Poetry. Asian American Studies. JAM ALERTS is the newest title from this important and prolific poet. "Linh Dinh is one of the most consistently surprising writers around. One can find sources & roots for his writing, explain the sources of surrealism through the presence, say, of the French in Vietnam (tho they were driven out a decade before he was born), note that he is hardly the only good or succesful Vietnamese American poety, let alone the only poet to come from a working class background, yet he is not writing 'about' or even 'toward' nor 'from' any one of these contexts so much as he is through them--they are lenses, filters that condition his perspective on everyday life. Imagine what any other poet with this strong a sense of form would have to become in order to write such poetry...Linh is writing straightforward poetry, but from a perspective shared by almost no one else. This kind of exile is far deeper than mere geography"--Ron Silliman. Be sure to check out Linh Dinh's BORDERLESS BODIES and AMERICAN TATTS, both currently available from SPD.

Jam Alerts

Literature & Fiction

Dinh, Linh

Poetry

Chax Press

Poetry. "The ever-precise and brilliant James Schuyler characterized Vladimir Mayakovsky's poetry as brimming with the 'intimate yell.' Frank O'Hara got that energy pulsing in his work, but was tenderer, while Linh Dinh is more preposterous and full of outrage than either. Imagine a concoction that mixes Shakespeare's Falstaff and Celine's Bardum, frank, rollicking humor and hair-raising disgust. After adding fish sauce, a smelly cheese and sexual sweat, shake vigorously. Out of the bottle rises Linh Dinh. God talks to him and he talks about everything, including the body parts that Renaissance painters left out. No one does it better"--John Yau.

Some Kind of Cheese Orgy

Poetry. The prose poems in Linh Dihn's DRUNKARD BOXING are worldly, visual images that induce distinct feelings that only places and things can give you. The body and movement are ever present in Dinh's work and offer random detail in ways that make perfect sense. Dinh's other books includes Blood and Soup, Fake House: Stories, American Tatts, and more. Born in Vietnam, Linh Dinh came to the United States in 1975. He has published poetry in numerous journals, including Sulfur, New American Writing, and Kenyon Review. DRUNKARD BOXING is his first collection from the Philadelphia Publishing Project, which responds to the need for national exposure for emerging writers in Philadelphia.

Drunkard Boxing

Singing Horse Press

Fake House, the first collection of short stories by poet Linh Dinh, explores the weird, atrocious, fond, and ongoing intimacies between Vietnam and the United States. Linked by a complicated past, the characters are driven by an intense and angry energy. The politics of race and sex anchor Dinh's work as his men and women negotiate their way in a post-Vietnam War world. Dinh has said of his own work, "I incorporate a filth or uncleanness to make the picture more healthy--not to defile anything." While Fake House delves into the lives of marginal souls in two cultures, the characters' dignity lies, ultimately, in how they face the conflict in themselves and the world.

Fake House: Stories

Dramas & Plays

Seven Stories Press

Blood and Soap is a breakthrough collection of modern-day fables from a wildly inventive American writer whose fiction has been called "terse and edgy" (Booklist) and "vividly imagined" (Kirkus Reviews). Dinh's gift is for constructing, in the manner of Italo Calvino, simple narratives that quickly frame larger questions; with a poet's timing, the author builds his stories to the one or few climactic sentences that brand them with unforgettable meaning. In one tale, a Vietnamese boy's self-guided, haphazard study of English gives way to a meditation on the universality of language: "Everything seems chaotic at first, but nothing is chaotic. One can read anything: ants crawling on the ground; pimples on a face; trees in a forest." In another story, a man opens a newspaper and sees the photograph of a man he may have murdered, which he impulsively clips, only to feel that in doing so he unwittingly has sealed his crime: "As soon as I finished, I realized what I had done: by cutting my father's likeness out of the newspaper, I had removed him from the world." The collection crescendoes in displays of raw creative power, as in "Eight Plots," a rapid-fire of three- and four-sentence summaries, and the brilliant, impressionistic "!" Blood and Soap is an arresting collection from one of a small number of writers on the vanguard of American fiction.

Blood and Soap: Stories

United States

Linh Dinh is already one of the secret masters of short fiction. Love Like Hate is something like a traditional cross-cultural novel that's been shocked into life by Dinh's uncanny ability to tell us stories we didn't even know we wanted to hear. -- Ed Park, editor of The Believer In Love Like Hate, Linh Dinh weaves a dysfunctional family saga that doubles as a portrait of Vietnam in the last half century. Protagonists Kim Lan and Hoang Long marry in Saigon during the Vietnam War, uniting in a setting that allows Dinh's dark, deadpan humor to flourish. Describing his mushrooming cast of characters in unsentimental and sometimes absurd ways, Dinh embraces contradictions with the surreal exuberance of Matthew Sharpe and the stylistic élan of Italo Calvino.

Love Like Hate: A Novel

Roaming the country by bus and train, on a budget and without any institutional support, Linh Dinh set out to document, in words and pictures, what life is like for people. From Los Angeles, Cheyenne, Portland, and New Orleans, to Jackson and Wolf Point--Linh walked miles and miles through unfamiliar neighborhoods, talking to whoever would talk to him: the homeless living in tent cities, the peddlers, the protestors, the public preachers, the prostitutes. With the uncompromising eye of a Walker Evans or a Dorothea Lange, and the indomitable, forthright prose of a modern-day Nelson Algren or James Agee, Dinh documents the appalling and the absurd with warmth and honesty, giving voice to America's often forgotten citizens and championing the awesome strength it takes to survive for those on the bottom. Growing out of a photo and political writing blog Linh has maintained since 2009, Postcards from the End of America is an unflinching diary of what Linh sees as the accelerating collapse of America. Tracking the economic, political, and social unraveling--from the casinos to the abandoned factories and over all the sidewalks in between--with a poet's incisive tongue, Linh shows us the uncanny power of the people in the face of societal devastation.

Postcards from the End of America

History

Americas

Poetry. Asian American Studies. "Given that there are two kinds of readers in English, those who are passionate fans of the poetry of Linh Dinh and those who have yet to read his writing, ALL AROUND WHAT EMPTIES OUT is a major event, too long overdue. These are works without waste, with the driest sense of humor and, throughout, an underlying feel for the pain of living that calls to mind Kathy Acker as much as Kafka"--Ron Silliman. Lihn Dinh is the author of a collection of stories, Fake House (Seven Stories Press 2000). Published by Subpress/A'A Arts/Tinfish.

All Around What Empties Out

Subpress

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Dinh, Linh. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Dinh, Linh

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Dinh, Linh. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Jam Alerts

Some Kind of Cheese Orgy

Drunkard Boxing

Fake House: Stories

Blood and Soap: Stories

Love Like Hate: A Novel

Postcards from the End of America

Postcards from the End of America

All Around What Empties Out