Now available at Texas Tech University Press: Hà Nôi at Midnight, by Bảo Ninh, author of The Sorrow of War (1994). Ninh’s first English work published in almost thirty years, Hà Nôi at Midnight is a collection of stories contemplating the complex outpourings of war and the way it remakes human relationships.
Ninh, Vietnam’s foremost chronicler of the war and most internationally renowned writer, in conjunction with translators Quan Manh Ha and Cab Tran, enables Western readers to experience the issues the Vietnam War engendered through stories about the war-torn landscape, separated families, the burden of burying one’s comrades, and more.
TTUP is honored to have been given the opportunity to engage with Ninh and publish his remarkable new work, Hà Nôi at Midnight. We hope you will appreciate the emotional multitudes contained within Ninh’s collection of stories.
Pre-publication blurbs and reviews:
Thirty-five years after the appearance, in English translation, of The Sorrow of War comes this welcome new volume of Bảo Ninh’s astounding short fiction. Here, once again, is a master writer grappling with the long legacy of the American War in Vietnam in the body, the memory, and the culture of those who survived. An astonishing, moving book by one of our greatest chroniclers of the modern age.
—Christian Kiefer, author of Phantoms
It’s a great pleasure to see Bảo Ninh’s collection of short stories has finally been translated to English. The translators have done a superb job bridging the gaps of language and culture. A fine achievement!
—Andrew X. Pham, author of Catfish and Mandala and The Eaves of Heaven: A Life in Three Wars
These stories, which track the aftershocks of war as they ripple through time, are full of heartache and yearning. Miraculously, amid this grief and suffering, is a glowing ember of hope. What more can you ask of a book than it awakens and enriches your humanity?
—Ian Bassingthwaighte, author of Live from Cairo
With this collection, Bảo Ninh looks beyond the grand rhetoric of nationalism, revolution, and idealism to the more private language of suffering, reflection, and bittersweet experience. He crafts understated but deeply felt stories that illuminate the interior landscape of a postwar country and its emotionally damaged soldiers and civilians. Bảo Ninh proves once again . . . that he is one of Viet Nam’s most important postwar writers.
—Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Sympathizer
Noble, sad, precise, and humane, the great Vietnamese writer Bao Ninh’s short stories of war and postwar life read with an immediately engaging spontaneity, quietly piling event and detail until an apparently simple story becomes rich and complex and the sense of seeing, hearing, and, above all, feeling is so firmly established that it is like moving through the streets of humanity, through the kind of forests and settlements once burning with napalm. This man is a marvelous writer. Read him.
—George Szirtes, winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize
The way Ninh highlights the magnitude of loss in Vietnam distinguishes his writing from literature published in the United States, where Vietnamese people are often invisible, and the war is remembered as an American tragedy. The addition of Hà Nội at Midnight to the Vietnam War corpus of literature in the States helps facilitate the uncovering of a history that has been substantially one-sided, Americentrized, and propagandized.
—Mia Thompkins, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal
The richly drawn characters with dramatic arcs deftly presented in Bảo Ninh’s Hà Nội at Midnight should comfort audiences as they offer not only satisfying reading experiences but the unique twists [that], however minor, add important emotional and intellectual facets to the collective understanding of the sorrows of war.
—Paul Christiansen, Saigoneer