"A memoir in text, image, and song. In this unique hybrid work, author/musician Dao Strom navigates the spaces between shores, mother and father, two cultures. The daughter of writers, she fled Vietnam with her mother at the end of the war. It was not until years later that she learned her father was still alive and had spent a decade in Communist "reeducation" camps as persecution for his work as a writer in the pre-1975 era of Saigon. This rift--caught between the forward-looking mother who severed ties with the past, and the only tenuous presence of a father who could not turn away from the past--is the initiating ethos behind this memoir, which renders itself also as an experiment in literary multimedia, combining text, image, and song to express the nuances and buried emotions of aftermath" --

"The book is informed by the Vietnamese immigrations of the nineteen–seventies but is filled with social observation of contemporary middle–class culture and indie sensibility . . . Quietly beautiful, Strom's stories are hip without being ironic." —The New Yorker When The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys was first published in 2006, it was groundbreaking in its depiction of contemporary young Vietnamese women living in the United States, centering their ordinary lives as mothers, lovers, friends, and daughters against the backdrop of immigration and assimilation. Available now for the first time in paperback and featuring an introduction by Isabelle Thuy Pelaud and a new preface by the author, The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys is a beautifully written, psychologically astute foray into the rite of female passage.

A Vietnamese family flees its war-torn home and resettles in California, in a novel that offers a “brilliant exploration of exile, loss, and identity” (Robert Olen Butler). Told from multiple perspectives and spanning several decades, Grass Roof, Tin Roof begins with the story of Tran, a Vietnamese writer facing government persecution, who flees her homeland during the exodus of 1975 and brings her two children to the West. Here, she marries a Danish American man who has survived a different war. He promises understanding and guidance—but the psychic consequences of his past soon hinder his relationships with the family, as the children, for whom the war is now a distant shadow, struggle to understand the world around them on their own terms. In delicate, innovative prose, Strom’s characters experience the collision of cultures and the spiritual aftermath of war on the most visceral level. Grass Roof, Tin Roof is “an affecting study on the slippery nature of home” (Los Angeles Times). “[Strom] explores the mysteries of loss, culture and identity, with skill, poignancy and imagination.” —Detroit Free Press

"Dao Strom's Instrument continues the author's virtuosic exploration of identity, selfhood and refusal-of stasis, of forgetting, of falsity. The book furthers creative and historical material Strom first explored in her books You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else and We Were Meant To Be a Gentle People while simultaneously exploring new directions, modes and fragments... ."--Publisher's website (viewed March 23, 2021).

What if women unraveled the evils of patriarchy? With men safely “gentled” in a worldwide Liberation, the matriarchy of Nedé has risen from the ashes. Seventeen-year-old Reina Pierce has never given a thought to the Brutes of old. Itching to escape her mother’s finca and keeping her training for the Alexia and her forbidden friendship a secret, her greatest worry is which Destiny she’ll choose on her next birthday. But when she’s selected as a candidate for the Succession instead, competing to become Nedé’s ninth Matriarch, she discovers their Eden has come at a cost she’s not sure she’s willing to pay. Jess Corban’s debut novel presents a new twist to the dystopian genre, delivering heart-pounding action, thought-provoking revelations, and a setting as lush as the jungles of Central America.

Short stories and accounts of human foibles telling true experiences of the authors' family members and friends keep readers chuckling and entertained.