{"product_id":"blood-and-soap-isbn-9781583226421","title":"Blood and Soap","description":"Blood and Soap is a breakthrough collection of modern-day fables from a wildly inventive American writer whose fiction has been called \"terse and edgy\" (Booklist) and \"vividly imagined\" (Kirkus Reviews). Dinh's gift is for constructing, in the manner of Italo Calvino, simple narratives that quickly frame larger questions; with a poet's timing, the author builds his stories to the one or few climactic sentences that brand them with unforgettable meaning. In one tale, a Vietnamese boy's self-guided, haphazard study of English gives way to a meditation on the universality of language: \"Everything seems chaotic at first, but nothing is chaotic. One can read anything: ants crawling on the ground; pimples on a face; trees in a forest.\" In another story, a man opens a newspaper and sees the photograph of a man he may have murdered, which he impulsively clips, only to feel that in doing so he unwittingly has sealed his crime: \"As soon as I finished, I realized what I had done: by cutting my father's likeness out of the newspaper, I had removed him from the world.\" The collection crescendoes in displays of raw creative power, as in \"Eight Plots,\" a rapid-fire of three- and four-sentence summaries, and the brilliant, impressionistic \"!\"\u003cbr\u003eBlood and Soap is an arresting collection from one of a small number of writers on the vanguard of American fiction.“A sort of Vietnamese Edgar Allan Poe for the 21st century . . . lyric qualities infuse Dinh's short fiction. So does a mordant sense of humor, and an immigrant's unceasing sense of not quite fitting in: not here, not there, not anywhere. . . . Death crosshatches these pages, too, but like a punch line more often than not. In my favorite story, 'What's Showing?', Dinh parodies film reviews. His versions have the Tarantino trick of making you grin when you should wince.” \u003cb\u003e–Susan Balée, Philadelphia Inquirer\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“The total effect of \u003ci\u003eBlood and Soap\u003c\/i\u003e is impossible to describe … It owes a certain debt to Jorge Luis Borges, but uses Borgesian metafiction and genre-bending to depict a sense of absurdity, confusion, and displacement peculiar to being a contemporary world citizen.” \u003cb\u003e–Matthew Sharpe, Brooklyn Rail\u003c\/b\u003eA recipient of a Pew Foundation grant, a David T. Wong Fellowship, a Lannan Residency and, most recently, the Asian American Literary Award, \u003cb\u003eLINH DINH\u003c\/b\u003e was born in Saigon in 1963 and emigrated to the United States in 1975. An acclaimed and provocative writer of short stories and contemporary fables, he is also the author of several books of poems and a novel, \u003ci\u003eLove Like Hate\u003c\/i\u003e. Linh has edited the anthologies \u003ci\u003eNight, Again: Contemporary Fiction from Vietnam\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eThree Vietnamese Poets\u003c\/i\u003e. His collection of stories, \u003ci\u003eBlood and Soap\u003c\/i\u003e was chosen by the \u003ci\u003eVillage Voice\u003c\/i\u003e as one of the Best Books of 2004. Linh's nonfiction essays have been published regularly at\u003ci\u003e Unz Review\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eLewRockwell\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eIntrepid Report\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eCounterCurrents\u003c\/i\u003e, and his blog, Postcards from the End of America (linhdinhphotos.blogspot.com), is followed by thousands of readers. He has also published widely in Vietnamese.","brand":"Seven Stories Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46305515602149,"sku":"NP9781583226421","price":16.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781583226421.jpg?v=1767722778","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/blood-and-soap-isbn-9781583226421","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}