The Cemetery of Chua Village and Other Stories by Doan Le, translated by Rosemary Nguyen, Wayne Karlin and Tuong Doung (Curbstone Books, 2005).

“This seventh volume in the “Voices from Vietnam” series introduces U. S. readers to another major figure in modern Vietnamese Doan Le. Noted for her versatility of style and her originality, she writes tales that are intensely human and universal, exploring such subjects as greed, marriage, divorce, aging and human rights. For the scholar, these stories give insight into Vietnamese culture after the “renovation”. For the general reader, these are stories that explore all the subtle enigmas of the human heart. As Wayne Karlin notes in his introduction, ‘[She] is a master of allegory and gently complex satire…her stories can often be fantastical—Sholom Aleichem’s village of Helm channeled by Kafka through Our Town— or they can be deeply personal and realistic. In both cases they grow unabashedly from the real vicissitudes of her life.'”

Behind the Red Mist by Ho Anh Thai, translated by Qui Duc Nguyen, Regina Abrami, Bac Hoai Tran, Ho Ang Thai, Wayne Karlin, Phan Thanh Ho, Dana Sachs (Curbstone Books, 1998)

“Behind the Red Mist gives us for the first time in English a wide range of stories from the most important writer of the post-war generation in Vietnam. The characters range from a party official who turns into a goat while watching porno movies, to an Indian who carries his mother’s bones in his knapsack, to a war widow trying desperately to piece together her life through the fragments of debris she collects from her back yard. The title novella “Behind the Red Mist” is a Vietnamese Back To the Future, a social satire in which a young man in the Hanoi of the eighties receives an electric shock and is transported back to his same apartment block in 1967 wartime Vietnam during the American bombing. He not only witnesses the war with the eyes of someone who knows its outcome, but participates in his parents’ courtship and discovers some truths about the generation held up to his own as a role model.”