Check Out The Boat
I met Nam Le at the last AWP and the thing that struck me as kind of cute is that he’s an Asian guy with an Australian accent. I have relatives who live all over the world, including Africa, so when they come to visit, I get to hear all sorts of crazy accents mixed in with their Chinese accent. Most of the time it does not work, but for some reason the Vietnamese/Australian thing seems to be a good combo, even though I generally don’t like Australian accents. Go figure.
Nam Le has a book of short stories out entitled The Boat and I found an interview with him on laist.com. When asked about how he came to write this collection, he said:
“…I can tell you that I never imagined, as I was writing these stories, that they would end up in a collection… I was writing these stories just as I started seriously reading short stories, and in part the diversity in this book is attributable to my having become simultaneously smitten with so many stories of all shapes and narratives stripes. I wanted each of my stories to work completely on its own terms, to answer solely to its own aspirations.
As for how they came to be published – a couple of years ago I holed myself up for seven cold months on the top floor of a barn in Provincetown to work on a novel, but found myself compulsively returning to and rejigging these stories. Finally I set the novel aside, knuckled down on the stories, collated them and sent them to my agent to hold in escrow. (He too was waiting for my novel.) I told him not to let me touch the stories again. He read them, then told me he thought they were ready. At that point I realized how conventional wisdom in publishing works – it doesn’t really.”
Check out the rest of the interview here.
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