A recipient of a Pew Foundation grant, a David T. Wong Fellowship, a Lannan Residency and, most recently, the Asian American Literary Award, LINH DINH was born in Saigon in 1963 and emigrated to the United States in 1975. An acclaimed and provocative writer of short stories and contemporary fables, he is also the author of several books of poems and a novel, Love Like Hate. Linh has edited the anthologies Night, Again: Contemporary Fiction from Vietnam and Three Vietnamese Poets. His collection of stories, Blood and Soap was chosen by the Village Voice as one of the Best Books of 2004. Linh's nonfiction essays have been published regularly at Unz Review, LewRockwell, Intrepid Report and CounterCurrents, and his blog, Postcards from the End of America (linhdinhphotos.blogspot.com), is followed by thousands of readers. He has also published widely in Vietnamese.
“A sort of Vietnamese Edgar Allan Poe for the 21st century . . . lyric qualities infuse Dinh's short fiction. So does a mordant sense of humor, and an immigrant's unceasing sense of not quite fitting in: not here, not there, not anywhere. . . . Death crosshatches these pages, too, but like a punch line more often than not. In my favorite story, 'What's Showing?', Dinh parodies film reviews. His versions have the Tarantino trick of making you grin when you should wince.” –Susan Balée, Philadelphia Inquirer “The total effect of Blood and Soap is impossible to describe … It owes a certain debt to Jorge Luis Borges, but uses Borgesian metafiction and genre-bending to depict a sense of absurdity, confusion, and displacement peculiar to being a contemporary world citizen.” –Matthew Sharpe, Brooklyn Rail