Thank you for joining us today’s guest post from Khanh Ha. I’ll have a review of his newest short story collection next week. Also stay tuned for how to enter the giveaway.
About the collection:
From Vietnam to America, this story collection, jewel-like, evocative and layered, brings to the readers a unique sense of love, passions and the tragedy of rape, all together contrasting a darker theme of perils. The titular story captures a simple love story that transcends cultural barriers. The opening story “A Woman-Child” brings the shy eroticism of adolescence set against a backdrop of the seaside with its ever present ecological beauty. A youthful love affair between an older American man and a much younger Vietnamese girl has its poignant brevity in “All the Pretty Little Horses.” In “The Yin-Yang Market” magical realism and the beauty of innocence abounds in deep dark places, teeming with life and danger. “A Mute Girl’s Yarn” tells a magical coming-of-age story like sketches in a child’s fairy book.
Bringing together the damned, the unfit, the brave who succumb by their own doing to the call of fate, their desire to survive never dying, it is a great journey to inhabit this world where redemption of human goodness arises out of violence and beauty to become part of its essential mercy.
As readers, we understand how much we love authors and want to get our books signed at events when we can, but today, Khanh Ha, author of All the Rivers Flow into the Sea & Other Stories, is going to share with us what it is like to be on the other side of that equation. What’s it like for an author at a book signing?
Please give Khanh Ha a warm welcome for his guest post in the form of a poem:
The Late Night People I met a woman during one of my book signings She came to the table where I sat with two stacks of hardcover copies She picked up one copy and said, What is it about? I’m never good at summarizing my work in a nutshell for something that had taken me two, three years to write Well, I said, it’s on the jacket flap where she could read what the copywriter had done as part of the cosmetic surgery so the work looks more like a movie actress than a whore The woman nodded, but didn’t read a word of it where I hoped she might have caught the advance praises full of superlatives that sometimes you thought they must’ve been copied and pasted in from another work But she just wanted to talk A soft-spoken woman straw-yellow hair no makeup like she’d just got out of bed and wandered into this place full of books like Alice in Wonderland We talked about pets and, in the name of God, she owed at least a dozen cats some of them neutered for overpopulation purpose and pet fish whose names I forgot expensive though She said one of them cost a hundred dollars And I learned that she worked part time somewhere in a graphics shop It was a quiet evening with no more than three interested readers who dropped by at my table but none bought any copy only she did without any idea of what the book was about When I left she had gone to an in-store coffee shop sitting on a high stool with a cup of coffee reading a day-old newspaper I had to run an errand that evening after the book signing and when I was done it was half past midnight I was driving down a cross-street two blocks from the bookstore where earlier I had my book signing Stopping at the intersection on a red light I looked over at a donut shop on a corner well lit, near empty I saw the woman who had bought a copy of my book sitting by herself close to the glass a Styrofoam cup of coffee in front of her She wasn’t reading anything just sitting and staring ahead I wondered where my book was For certain it wouldn’t have fit in her purse unless she had returned it after I left for a full refund.
Thank you, Khanh Ha, for sharing this horror story with us.
To Enter the Giveaway, Click Here.
If you enjoyed that, you will be blown away with his story telling/writing! I have read and loved all of his short stories and novels and given them all 5 star reviews. He is a writing master!
I loved that poem. What an interesting story, and what a character that woman was. Looking forward to your upcoming review!
Wasn’t that simply engaging?! This is how his stories are.