Join us on a literary world trip!
Add this book to bookshelf
Grey
Write a new comment Default profile 50px
Grey
Subscribe to read the full book or read the first pages for free!
I want to read the book!
All characters reduced
Birds of Paradise Lost - Stories - cover

Birds of Paradise Lost - Stories

Andrew Lam

Publisher: Red Hen Press

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

Summary

From the award-winning author of Perfume Dreams, a collection of thirteen short stories following Vietnamese immigrants new to the United States. The thirteen stories in Birds of Paradise Lost shimmer with humor and pathos as they chronicle the anguish and joy and bravery of America’s newest Americans, the troubled lives of those who fled Vietnam and remade themselves in the San Francisco Bay Area. The past—memories of war and its aftermath, of murder, arrest, re-education camps and new economic zones, of escape and shipwreck and atrocity—is ever present in these wise and compassionate stories. It plays itself out in surprising ways in the lives of people who thought they had moved beyond the nightmares of war and exodus. It comes back on TV in the form of a confession from a cannibal; it enters the Vietnamese restaurant as a Vietnam Vet with a shameful secret; it articulates itself in the peculiar tics of a man with Tourette’s Syndrome who struggles to deal with a profound tragedy. Birds of Paradise Lost is an emotional tour de force, intricately rendering the false starts and revelations in the struggle for integration, and in so doing, the human heart.*Finalist for the California Book Award* “His stories are elegant and humane and funny and sad. Lam has instantly established himself as one of our finest fiction writers.” —Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Perfume Mountain  “Read Andrew Lam, and bask in his love of language, and his compassion for people, both those here and those far away.” —Maxine Hong Kingston, award-winning author of The Woman Warrior
Available since: 03/01/2012.
Print length: 216 pages.

Other books that might interest you

  • The Penitent Sinner - cover

    The Penitent Sinner

    Leo Tolstoy

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0 
    Leo Tolstoy (1828 – 1910) is one of the most famous Russian writers and thinkers and is considered one of the greatest writers in the world. His work marked a new stage of the development of the Russian and world’s realism and connected the literature of the XIX and the XX centuries. His short stories stated his thoughts on the God, the Good and the Evil and their place in our lives.This story is a parable of a sinner trying to get past the Pearly Gates having no good thing done during his lifetime. As different people answer his knocking on the Gates, he tries to persuade them to let him in facing one refusal after another. But what would be a real reason to let the sinner go into the Garden of Eden? Despite you may disagree, the story will definitely set you thinking.A SmartTouch Media production.
    Show book
  • Caterpillars - cover

    Caterpillars

    E. F. Benson

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0 
    Edward Frederic Benson (1867-1940) was an English novelist, biographer, memoirist, archaeologist, and short story writer, best known for his evocative and beautifully narrated ghost stories.Caterpillars is the story of a strange visit to the mysterious Villa Cascana, where one bedroom is inexplicably always kept empty. The visitor feels uneasy immediately on arriving, although there is no obvious reason why he should. And then the nightmares begin. Or are they nightmares? Surely the sinister, terrifying caterpillars which infest the empty room cannot be more than just a bad dream....
    Show book
  • Master Zacharius - cover

    Master Zacharius

    Jules Verne

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0 
    Jules Gabriel Verne was born on February 8th, 1828 on Île Feydeau, a small artificial island on the Loire River in Nantes. 
 
His father wanted his son to take over the family law practice.  Jules started along this course and despite graduating with a licence en droit in January 1851 was soon diverted by the lure of literature and by his own ambitious talents in this direction. 
 
He wrote for the theatre and for magazines and soon with the publication of his first novel; Five Weeks in a Balloon on January 31st, 1863 he had begun his career as an admired and popular author. 
 
For many, many years the works flowed, usually no less than and often more than two volumes per year.  His meticulous research and imaginative setting and narratives soon established him as a top selling author and he became both famous and wealthy. 
 
By publishing firstly as a serialised book and then as a complete book sales swelled as did his reputation. His earnings increased further due to the runaway success from the stage adaptations of Le tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours (1874) and Michel Strogoff (1876), Strangely he was overlooked for honours. He was not even nominated for membership of the Académie Française.   
 
After the death of both his mother and Hetzel, Jules began to publish darker works but still at a prodigious rate.  In 1888, Jules entered politics and was elected town councillor of Amiens, and then served for fifteen years.  Jules was now entering the last period of his life.  His works continued to flow albeit at a slower pace. His reconciled with his son, Michel who now became an active contributor to his father’s works and, when the senior Verne died, would continue to contribute and publish his father’s works, ensuring that the work was kept in the public eye and the legacy preserved. 
 
On March 24th, 1905, while ill with diabetes, Jules Verne died at his home at 44 Boulevard Longueville, Amiens. 
 
As a legacy Jules Verne is forever remembered as ‘The Father of Science Fiction’.  With his rigorous research Jules was not only able to make his works realistic but also to project forward and predict many new things that would eventually come to pass – either in real life or as the basis for others to use in their own science fiction.  Extraordinary indeed.
    Show book
  • The Devil of the Marsh - cover

    The Devil of the Marsh

    H. B. Marriott Watson

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0 
    H. B. Marriott Watson (1863-1921) was a prolific author who wrote over 40 books, including 17 short story collections. His writing included adventures and historical romances, mystery, fantasy and supernatural fiction.For the first nine years of his life, Marriott Watson lived in Australia. Early in 1873, Marriott Watson moved to New Zealand, where his father was incumbent of St John's, Christchurch. In 1885 he traveled to England, where he settled. Though not a prolific writer of supernatural fiction, a couple of his stories, notably 'The Devil of the Marsh' and 'The Stone Chamber', are regarded as classics of their kind.'The Devil of the Marsh' tells the story of a man bewitched by a sinister fairie of the marshes....
    Show book
  • Greener Pastures - cover

    Greener Pastures

    Michael Wehunt

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0 
    "Greener Pastures" is a short horror story by Michael Wehunt, one of 35 entries in the audio horror anthology Come Join Us by the Fire. 
A long haul trucker is faces down a lonesome night as mysterious voices on the radio lures unwary folk into a darkness from which they may never return. 
Come Join Us by the Fire, edited by Theresa DeLucci, is an audio-only horror anthology of 35 short stories from Nightfire Books, a horror imprint of Tor Books. The collection showcases the breadth of talent writing in the horror genre today, with contributions from a wide range of bestselling genre luminaries including China Miéville, Chuck Wendig, Richard Kadrey, and Victor LaValle; Shirley Jackson Award winners Paul Tremblay, Priya Sharma, and Sam J. Miller; Nebula Award winners Brooke Bolander, Alyssa Wong, Kij Johnson; and many, many more.
    Show book
  • Householders - cover

    Householders

    Kate Cayley

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0 
    A CBC BOOKS AND QUILL & QUIRE ANTICIPATED FALL BOOK 		 
A LAMBDA LITERARY MOST ANTICIPATED LGBTQIA+ TITLE		 
A 49TH SHELF BOOK OF THE YEAR 2021		 
Linked short stories about families, nascent queers, and self-deluded utopians explore the moral ordinary strangeness in their characters’ overlapping lives.		 
A woman impersonates a nun online, with unexpected consequences. In a rapidly changing neighborhood, tensions escalate around two events planned for the same day. The barista girlfriend of a tech billionaire survives a zombie apocalypse only to face spending her life with the paranoid super-rich. From a university campus to an underground bunker, a commune in the woods to Toronto and back again, the linked stories in Householders move effortlessly between the commonplace and the fantastic. In deft and exacting narratives about difficult children and thorny friendships, hopeful revolutionaries and self-deluded utopians, nascent queers, sincere frauds, and families of all kinds, Kate Cayley mines the moral hazards inherent in the ways we try to save each other and ourselves.
    Show book