Leading Vietnamese-American author Andrew
Lam will speak about his new book, Birds
of Paradise Lost, in the Martin Luther King Library (room 255) on
Wednesday, March 20 from 12:00 noon to 1:00 pm.
This event is free and open to the
public.
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. He is an editor and cofounder of New American Media, an
association of over two thousand ethnic media outlets in the U.S. He
was a regular commentator on NPR’s All
Things Considered for many years, and was the subject of a 2004 PBS
documentary 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.
The
thirteen stories in Birds of Paradise
Lost shimmer with humor and pathos as they chronicle the anguish and joy
and bravery of new Americans, the troubled lives of those who fled Vietnam and
remade themselves in the San Francisco Bay Area. Past memories -- of war
and its aftermath, of murder, arrest, re-education camps and new economic
zones, of escape and shipwreck and atrocity -- are ever present in Andrew Lam’s
wise and compassionate stories. Birds
of Paradise Lost is an emotional tour de force, intricately rendering the
false starts and revelations in the immigrant experience, and in so doing, the
human heart.
“Read Andrew Lam, and bask in his love of
language, and his compassion for people, both those here and those from far
away. He reminds us that we have history in common; we can laugh and cry
together.”
-- Maxine Hong Kingston
“Andrew Lam’s Birds of Paradise Lost brilliantly engages the fundamental theme of
much great literary work: who am I and what is my place in the universe? His
stories are elegant and humane and funny and sad. Lam has instantly established
himself as one of our finest fiction writers.”
-- Robert Olen Butler
Contact:
Matthew Spangler
Associate Professor of Communication Studies
matthew.spangler@sjsu.edu 
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