The Boat

Nam Le was born in Vietnam and raised in Australia. He has received the Pushcart Prize, the Michener-Copernicus Society of America Award, and fellowships from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and Phillips Exeter Academy. His fiction has been appeared in venues including Best Australian Stories, Best New American Voices, Best American Nonrequired Reading, Zoetrope, Conjunctions, A Public Space, and NPR's Selected Shorts.

* A breathtakingly assured collection of stories-powerful, moving, unsparingly honest-exhibiting a narrative confidence and range that is as remarkable as it is mature. A tremendous debut. -- William Boyd * A promising and fiercely talented writer Telegraph * The short story collection is constantly on the endangered list, but this stunning collection...shows that it is alive and in the best of health. The Times * An assured and tremendously readable collection from a young writer with rare scope and strength. Observer * These are people on the edge, and Nam's prose captures their desperation...bold and worthwhile. Memoirists should stick to what they know; the point of literature is to expand the limits of the world. -- Aravind Adiga Financial Times * Le has the ability to hit notes of real emotional intensity. -- Hari Kunzru Scotsman * Each voice is achingly present and authentic ... ['Halflead Bay'] is as good as anything Tim Winton has produced about Australian society. Guardian * Wonderful stories that snarl and pant across our crazed world ... an extraordinary performance by a fine new talent. Nam Le is a heartbreaker, not easily forgotten. -- Junot Diaz * The Boat is tremendous, challenging and ambitious, worthy of the same shelf that holds Dubliners and The Things They Carried-like those works, it asks to be read as a whole and taken seriously as a book... this book nails our collective now, our kairos, with an urgency and relevance that feels visionary. Charles D'Ambrosio * From the very first page of The Boat, Nam Le's extraordinary talent, range of vision, and moral courage make the reader sit up and take notice. By the last page, one feels a kind of fervent gratitude-rare enough these days-for having been introduced to a young writer whose mark on the literary world, so freshly made, will only grow deeper in the years to come. John Burnham Schwartz * Nam Le writes with a rare blend of courage and beauty ... Book your passage on The Boat. You will not