Blood and soap

"Linh Dinh's is a unique voice in contemporary American literature. He writes with the raging wit and the soul of a poet."-Jessica Hagedorn, author of Dogeaters and The Gangster of Love Edgy and hard-hitting, pure and sublime, Blood and Soap is award-winning Linh Dinh's newest collection of short stories. Dinh's incisive, tightly woven prose peeks into the extraordinary lives of men and women in Vietnam, America and Europe. Here are ghost stories of a haunted Vietnamese hotel and wildly clever parables concerning a rich man and his poor friend. The meaning of true freedom and independence are explored when a white Southerner in 19th-century America swaps roles with his slave. A young man in Vietnam becomes obsessed with an invented language and poses as an English teacher. A New Yorker watches his neighbor practice English by shouting headlines from tabloids. A convicted serial killer examines his relationship with women, while his cellmate views his wife's murder and his subsequent imprisonment as the fulfillment of destiny. A "happy couple" exchanges pleasantries during the day but are abusive in their sleep. Artist and writer Linh Dinh was born in 1963 in Saigon, and came to the U.S. in 1975. He gained literary recognition as the author of an acclaimed chapbook of poems, Drunkard Boxing and as the editor of the award-winning collection of Vietnamese fiction Night, Again (Seven Stories Press, 1996). His poems, fiction, reviews and translations have appeared in Sulfur, American Poetry Review, and Denver Quarterly. In 1993, he was awarded the Pew Fellowship for poetry. His prose poem "The Most Beautiful Word" was anthologized in The Best American Poems of 2000.