Here’s something everyone can agree on. For the occasion of his first book, Afterparties, Anthony Veasna So would have loved it all: the interviews, book tour, readings, attention, praise, pans, mythmaking, the opportunity to opine on the treacly queer writers he hates (or at least shade them) and the insufficiency of Asian American identity. He might talk about how he identified as Cambodian American before Asian American and, for that matter, Californian before American, which would have been a way of making space for himself as well as others. Some writers might be tentative about the limelight, but not him. His parents survived the Khmer Rouge genocide, and he survived Stockton, California, so you can be damned sure he’d make every second count.
One of my least favorite memories from college is my senior thesis reading, during which my roommate and fellow English major stepped behind the lectern to read the 22 interminable pages of my short story. I listened anxiously from the audience, hoping no one would ask me afterward why I hadn’t read it myself. My professors and closest friends knew the reason, but back then it still seemed important, imperative even, to deny what must have been more obvious than I ever let myself believe.
As I chronicle in my memoir, Blind Man’s Bluff, I devoted much of my time and energy to passing for sighted, to downplaying what I couldn’t see in hopes that everyone I knew, from girlfriends to roommates to myself, might forget that I was blind.
The propensity to cry emotional tears is uniquely human. Of all the claims to human exceptionality—consciousness, intelligence, innovation—it is the liquid that falls from our eyes when we are sad, happy, jealous, angry, and grateful, more than anything else, that we can call ours, and ours alone.
And yet the act of emotional crying is poorly understood. There is remarkably little consensus about the purpose of crying, its underlying physiology, and its impact on our moods. “What intrigued me about crying is how few people in the world have been studying it,” said Lauren Bylsma, an assistant professor of psychiatry and psychology at the University of Pittsburgh. “You would think with such a ubiquitous and important behavior, there would be more known about it.”
Anthony Veasna So's debut story collection Afterparties contains multitudes, embodying both the author's Cambodian American heritage and his life-affirming worldview. The title alludes to the aftermath of war, the 1975 Khmer Rouge genocide — but also the idea of getting down with friends and family for a real celebration after some stuffy social event.
So died unexpectedly in December of 2020, but has left us with an indelible posse of "Cambos" from his hometown of Stockton, California. His people are philosophical, queer, angry, bossy, romantic, unfaithful, filial, and defiant survivors who consider the genocide "to be the source of all [their] problems and none of them."
So’s stories allow the past to well up into the present without force or preciousness. “Afterparties” insists on a prismatic understanding of Cambodian American diaspora through stories that burst with as much compassion as comedy, making us laugh just when we’re on the verge of crying.
Unlike that demon-haunted story about a writer-turned-killer, this tale of a killer-turned-writer is haunted only by books — King’s own, but a mass of others too. They aren’t necessarily the ones you would expect — no mention of Poe or Lovecraft or Shirley Jackson (acknowledged influences) — but at some level “Billy Summers” is clearly the work of a writer in retrospective mood: taking stock, paying his dues.
In the summer of 2007, a short story by a young Korean-American writer named David Hoon Kim appeared in the pages of The New Yorker. It was Kim’s first published work of fiction. This auspicious beginning is normally the stuff of literary legend, about as straight-line a course for a book deal as a young writer could hope for, but for Kim, the book itself was a long time coming.
To that end, it can be tempting to read “Paris Is a Party, Paris Is a Ghost” as an immigrant’s tale, a doleful, beautifully written study of the confused yearnings and scars of exile. But the identity crisis here is deeper, roiled by the universal, often doomed impulse to imbue meaning where it no longer exists.
The brushstrokes of plot that kick off “Something New Under the Sun,” the second novel by Alexandra Kleeman, suggest the makings of a mildly satirical novel starring yet another neurotic upper-middle-class family. But that’s just misdirection, and Kleeman excels at it; what follows is muscular, brilliant, bonkers, an incredibly upsetting portrait of not only who we are but what we may yet become.
There are no astonishing twists in “The Husbands”; anyone who’s read “The Stepford Wives” (or watched the movie) will have an idea how this ends. Still, I found myself holding my breath, both hoping and not hoping that Nora would choose differently. It’s a testament to Baker’s talents as a writer that the final scenes of this familiar story are a gut punch nonetheless. She has a gift for depicting flawed, desperate characters who make decisions that are as sympathetic as they are disgusting and selfish.