A talk with Andrew Lam, author of Stories from the Edge of the Sea

In observance of the 50th anniversary of the end of the The Vietnam War and Asian American & Pacific Islander Heritage Month, the Santa Clara City Library is proud to host world renowned author and journalist Andrew Lam for his new book, Stories from the Edge of the Sea. Lam will be giving a talk on his work, the ever expanding narratives from the Vietnamese diaspora, with a book signing at the end of the event.

About The Book:

At times humorous and ecstatic, other times poetic and elegiac, the fourteen pieces in Stories from the Edge of the Sea explore love and loss, lust and grief, longing and heartbreaks through the lives of Vietnamese immigrants and their children in California. A younger dancer is haunted by memories of almost dying on a boat when they escaped from Vietnam, a widow processes her husband’s death through frantic Facebook postings, a writer enters an old lover’s home and sees a ghost at twilight. If the human heart is a vast, open-ended terrain, then Andrew Lam’s short stories are its mountains, valleys, and lakes. Together they seek to chart a barely explored country

“Andrew Lam might’ve entitled this book War and Love, so universal and personal are his stories. I promise you: read Stories from the Edge of the Sea, and you will receive gifts of wonder and grief, shock and delight.”
—Maxine Hong Kingston, author of The Woman Warrior, China Men, Tripmaster Monkey, and others

“These stories powerfully evoke the emotional world of the displaced, struggling to find their (our?) ways amid the roadless landscapes of post-colonial late-stage capitalism. Moving and poignant, Lam’s perceptions are at times funny, at other times tragic, always underlain with a bass note of nostalgia for a vanished world. Stories from the Edge of the Sea complements Lam’s earlier, equally fine collection Birds of Paradise Lost. Together with Perfume Dreams, his collection of essays, readers receive superbly complex insights into diaspora—for those Vietnamese forced from their country, of course, but for anyone who has loved and lost a lover, a landscape, a home.”
—Fenton Johnson, author of At the Center of All Beauty: Solitude and the Creative Life

“Andrew Lam’s Stories from The Edge of the Sea beautifully offers tales of longing, repression, and love as he recalls experiences of immigration and confronts the ruptures amidst generational memories. These stories are indelible, profound, and unforgettable.”
—Lynn Novick, codirector of The Vietnam War

About The Author:

Andrew Lam fled Vietnam with his family during the fall of Saigon in April 1975 when he was eleven years old. He attended the University of California, Berkeley, studying biochemistry, but abandoned plans for medical school after graduation. He entered the creative writing program at San Francisco State University instead. While still in school, he began writing for Pacific News Service and in 1993 won the Outstanding Young Journalist Award from the Society of Professional Journalists. He has written for many newspapers and magazines since, including National Geographic Traveler, Los Angeles Times Magazine, and The Nation. A regular commentator on NPR’s All Things Considered for over seven years, Lam is the author of four books and has won the PEN Open Book Award, the Josephine Miles Literary Award, and many others.

He served as a Journalism Fellow at Stanford from 2001 to 2002. In 2004 a PBS documentary about his life called My Journey Home, in which a film crew followed him back to Vietnam, was aired nationwide. Lam has lectured at many universities and colleges and taught as a writer-in-residence at San Jose State University from 2015 to 2016.

He is the author of the 2006 PEN/Beyond Margins Award winning collection Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora, East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres, Birds of Paradise Lost, and his latest, Stories from The Edge of the Sea.