Events › Stories from the Edge of the Sea: A Conversation with Author Andrew Lam (Virtual/In Person)

Join the San Jose Public Library for a special conversation with author Andrew Lam on the verge of the 50th anniversary of the Fall of Saigon (1975-2025).

Author Andrew Lam will present his upcoming book, Stories from the Edge of the Sea.

About The Book (source: Red Hen Press)

At times humorous and ecstatic, other times poetic and elegiac, the fourteen pieces in Stories from the Edge of the Sea explore love and loss, lust and grief, longing and heartbreaks through the lives of Vietnamese immigrants and their children in California. A younger dancer is haunted by memories of almost dying on a boat when they escaped from Vietnam, a widow processes her husband’s death through frantic Facebook postings, a writer enters an old lover’s home and sees a ghost at twilight. If the human heart is a vast, open-ended terrain, then Andrew Lam’s short stories are its mountains, valleys, and lakes. Together they seek to chart a barely explored country

“Andrew Lam might’ve entitled this book War and Love, so universal and personal are his stories. I promise you: read Stories from the Edge of the Sea, and you will receive gifts of wonder and grief, shock and delight.”
—Maxine Hong Kingston, author of The Woman Warrior, China Men, Tripmaster Monkey, and others

“Andrew Lam’s Stories from The Edge of the Sea beautifully offers tales of longing, repression, and love as he recalls experiences of immigration and confronts the ruptures amidst generational memories. These stories are indelible, profound, and unforgettable.”
—Lynn Novick, codirector of The Vietnam War

About The Author:

Andrew Lam is the author of Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora, which won the 2006 PEN Open Book Award, and East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres. Lam is an editor and cofounder of New America Media, an association of over two thousand ethnic media outlets in America.

He was a regular commentator on NPR’s All Things Considered for many years, and was the subject of a 2004 PBS documentary called My Journey Home. His essays have appeared in newspapers and magazines such as the New York Times, The LA Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Baltimore Sun, The Atlanta Journal, the Chicago Tribune, Mother Jones, and The Nation, among many others. His short stories have been widely taught and anthologized. Birds of Paradise Lost is his first story collection and due out by Red Hen Press in the spring of 2013.

Free Admission. Free 90-Min Parking at the Fourth Street Garage Parking. 

NOTE: This is an hybrid (Zoom and in-person) program. All registrants will receive a Zoom link. Attendants are welcome to join the program in-person. The presenter will appear in person at the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Library, 150 E. San Fernando St., San Jose, CA 95112, in the Digital Humanities Center (First Floor).

ADA Accommodation Requests.