Vignettes of Vietnam & Other Colorful Stories is a nostalgic collage of short stories, fermented and lingering, some for years, waiting on a venue to finally emerge. Hopefully, that time is now! Vignettes of Vietnam chronicles a young soldier’s experiences during his year’s tour of duty in the war-torn country and the discovery, while on an ambush patrol, of horrific photographs of GI comrades, captured, tortured and mutilated; the discovery of his Homie, butchered during an overnight LPR (Long Range Patrol), and his own subsequent escape, using arboreal survival strategies. The Excremenator provides insight into the violent life of young Anthony Morris. Born in the ‘hood’ (Chicago), he is a victim of the vicious street gang culture that results in the senseless death of his beautiful and beloved, Janet. Tired of the meaningless violence, he welcomes military conscription as a viable means of escape and redemption. But sent to ‘Nam, he’s forced to confront the reality of the correlation—urban (street gang affiliation), versus Jungle (military warfare), which proves instrumental in the determination of his outlook on life, as well as and his nasty name! The Night the Cow Got in Zion Franklin, Unforgettable Fang Grey, Snake Dancing, “A Tree. . . So Far! are comical (hopefully, colorful) highlights of an era long past.

A runaway bestseller in Quebec, with foreign rights sold to 15 countries around the world, Kim Thúy's Governor General's Literary Award-winning Ru is a lullaby for Vietnam and a love letter to a new homeland. Ru. In Vietnamese it means lullaby; in French it is a small stream, but also signifies a flow - of tears, blood, money. Kim Thúy's Ru is literature at its most crystalline: the flow of a life on the tides of unrest and on to more peaceful waters. In vignettes of exquisite clarity, sharp observation and sly wit, we are carried along on an unforgettable journey from a palatial residence in Saigon to a crowded and muddy Malaysian refugee camp, and onward to a new life in Quebec. There, the young girl feels the embrace of a new community, and revels in the chance to be part of the American Dream. As an adult, the waters become rough again: now a mother of two sons, she must learn to shape her love around the younger boy's autism. Moving seamlessly from past to present, from history to memory and back again, Ru is a book that celebrates life in all its wonder: its moments of beauty and sensuality, brutality and sorrow, comfort and comedy.

Get a taste of the real Vietnam and its people on a sometimes funny, always fascinating journey from the bustling cities to the out of the way villages, into Buddhist monasteries and along the Mekong - a real delight for armchair travellers and those contemplating their own adventure.

This book is a must-read for any specialist in the history of colonial and post-colonial psychiatry, as well as a fantastic case study for those interested in the social history of European colonialism more generally.― Choice Claire Edington's fascinating look at psychiatric care in French colonial Vietnam challenges our notion of the colonial asylum as a closed setting, run by experts with unchallenged authority, from which patients rarely left. She shows instead a society in which Vietnamese communities and families actively participated in psychiatric decision-making in ways that strengthened the power of the colonial state, even as they also forced French experts to engage with local understandings of, and practices around, insanity. Beyond the Asylum reveals how psychiatrists, colonial authorities, and the Vietnamese public debated both what it meant to be abnormal, as well as normal enough to return to social life, throughout the early twentieth century. Straddling the fields of colonial history, Southeast Asian studies and the history of medicine, Beyond the Asylum shifts our perspective from the institution itself to its relationship with the world beyond its walls. This world included not only psychiatrists and their patients, but also prosecutors and parents, neighbors and spirit mediums, as well as the police and local press. How each group interacted with the mentally ill, with each other, and sometimes in opposition to each other, helped decide the fate of those both in and outside the colonial asylum.

Readers interested in the visual arts, in translation studies, or in popular culture, as well as a wider audience wishing to discover the tale anew will delight in this collection.