Fiction. Winner of a 2009 PEN/Beyond Margins Award. At once a fairy tale, a fortune, and a translation told through the I Ching, Vietnamese-American author Lily Hoang's CHANGING is a ghostly and miniature novel. Both mysterious and lucid at once, the book follows Little Girl down a century-old path into her family's story. Changing is Little Girl's fate, and in CHANGING she finds an unsettling, beautiful home. Like a topsy-turvy horoscope writer, Hoang weaves a modern novella into the classical form of the I Ching. In glassine sentences, fragmented and new, Jack and Jill fall down the hill over and over again in intricate and ancient patterns. Here is a wonder story for 21st century America. Here is a calligraphic patchwork of sadness. "This is an impossible thing, a dream object."—Joyelle McSweeney

Changing

Hoang, Lily

Literature & Fiction

Fairy Tale Review Press

The simple act of a butterfly flapping its wings, and our journey begins. A tracing of modern day mythologies, Parabola weaves through genres, mathematical formulas, and photographs, all while following the curve of a parabola, stopping at various points to pick up strands of intersections or stories. Lily Hoang’s debut novel offers readers tender snapshots of an Asian American girl coming- of-age juxtaposed with the Pythagorean belief in numerology placed right beside a physical manifestation of dark matter contrasted with interactive IQ, personality, and psychological tests. Smart, challenging, sad, and kind, by the end of Parabola, you will have moved through every emotion, and you will end right where you began, with that simple act of a butterfly flapping its wings.

Parabola

Contemporary

Chiasmus Press

FULL-COLOR ILLUSTRATED EDITION: Award-winning author Lily Hoang invited some of the top innovative writers in the U.S. to submit unfinished stories that she then completed over the course of one summer. Although Hoang attempted to follow each respective writer's style, the stories are distinctly her own, resulting in a mesmerizing and highly entertaining collection. Unfinished stories were donated by Kate Bernheimer, Blake Butler, Beth Couture, Debra Di Blasi, Justin Dobbs, Trevor Dodge, Zach Dodson, Brian Evenson, Scott Garson, Carol Guess, Elizabeth Hildreth, John Madera, Ryan Manning, Michael Martone, Kelcey Parker, Ted Pelton, Kathleen Rooney, Davis Schneiderman, Michael Stewart, and J.A. Tyler. Unfinished cover and interior art was donated by notable and naive artists, then finished by artist and gallery curator, Anne Austin Pearce.

Unfinished: stories finished by Lily Hoang

Short Stories & Anthologies

Jaded Ibis Press

30 Under 30 is an anthology of thirty top young writers publishing fiction today. Editors Blake Butler and Lily Hoang have compiled a collection of thirty stories from these thirty writers—all creating work on the more innovative side of things; a great opportunity for a reader to dip into their various styles and see which authors to look for more from.
Includes work from authors such as Shane Jones (Light Boxes), Matt Bell (How They Were Found), Joshua Cohen (Witz), and Kathleen Rooney (Live Nude Girl) and twenty-six others breaking ground, many publishing with smaller publishers.

30 Under 30: An Anthology of Innovative Fiction by Younger Writers

Butler, Blake

United States

Starcherone Books

Literary Nonfiction. Essays. Winner of the 2015 Essay Collection Competition, Selected by Wayne Koestenbaum. "Rarely have I come across tenderness, venom, and fire held so intimately, so exquisitely, as in Lily Hoang's A BESTIARY. This book would be impressive enough as a collection of finely-forged fragments, but as it weaves itself into an even more impressive whole, my hat came off. Lily Hoang writes like she has nothing to lose and everything at stake."—Maggie Nelson "A BESTIARY is a work of great subtlety, precision, intelligence, daring, and emotive keenness. It seems completely contemporary (by which I mean that it is unlike anything I've read and that it makes me want to change my own writerly procedures). With head-long, reckless, improvisatory gestures, Lily Hoang prompts us to rethink what literature today can dare to aspire to. Her intellectually magnanimous book's position on the threshold between recognizable 'literature' and some other vanguard form of performance/utterance made me feel happy and stimulated and dizzy (in a rapturous way) while I was reading it."—Wayne Koestenbaum "The most perfect use of fragmentation, myth, language, fairytale, and terrible beauty that I have ever seen in my life. I'm swooning. My faith in what writing can be has been restored."—Lidia Yuknavitch

A Bestiary

Self-Help

Relationships

Cleveland State University Poetry Center

Over a five-year period, Martha Johnson murders her four children, one by one, in order to punish her husband when they argue, but Martha is no ordinary serial killer. She murders her children by using the bulk of her 250-pound body to suffocate them. Unlike other fictionalized true-crime novels, Underneath neither valorizes nor focuses on the specific acts of violence. Instead, it attempts to understand how feelings of powerlessness, the residue of trauma, and the need to find justice in a world that refuses to give a fat body justice finds its only respite through murder.

Underneath

Red Hen Press

Fiction. What if evolution was decided by committee and revolution by mere chance? What if man was a subspecies? What if man, as a subspecies, was woman, with tiny red wings on her thighs and pasted shut eyes? What if she flew in the sky or slept on the moon, and what if the earth was a saltless water world filled with forgetful, vengeful two-headed mermen? Welcome to THE EVOLUTIONARY REVOLUTION, a fabulist story of sense-making for the 21st century. In this twinning tale of freak shows and prophets, tract homes and impending doom, award-winning author Lily Hoang collapses time and narrative into a brilliant novel of beginnings and ends, where sentences undo each other and opposites don't cancel each other out. As Anna Joy Springer notes in the book's introduction, "In literature, as sometimes in life, it's a scary kind of fun to be manipulated by a pretty girl, who changes the game on a whim."

The Evolutionary Revolution (Trenchart: Maneuvers)

Les Figues Press

[BLACK ON CREAM EDITION] "LILY HOANG IS A DARING WRITER." –William Walsh, Kenyon Review Award-winning author Lily Hoang invited some of the top innovative writers in the U.S. to submit unfinished stories that she then completed over the course of one summer. Although Hoang attempted to follow each respective writer's style, the stories are distinctly her own, resulting in a mesmerizing and highly entertaining collection. Unfinished stories were donated by Kate Bernheimer, Blake Butler, Beth Couture, Debra Di Blasi, Justin Dobbs, Trevor Dodge, Zach Dodson, Brian Evenson, Scott Garson, Carol Guess, Elizabeth Hildreth, John Madera, Ryan Manning, Michael Martone, Kelcey Parker, Ted Pelton, Kathleen Rooney, Davis Schneiderman, Michael Stewart, and J.A. Tyler.

Unfinished: stories finished by

Is there any avant-garde? What’s at stake when 100 writers think through issues of accessibility and audience? This is a book comprised of answers―to these questions and their offspring―as various and contradictory as its contributors, ranging from Eileen Myles, Lyn Hejinian, and Joyelle McSweeney to Blake Butler, Jenny Boully, and Rikki Ducornet, among dozens of others. The results here provide discrepant engagements on the most pressing questions of the literary, the political, and the force of what's possible for writers in the 21st Century.

The Force of What’s Possible: Writers on Accessibility & the Avant-Garde

Arts & Photography

Nightboat Books

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