Timber and Lua: Stories Lily Hong 9781636284316

AWARD-WINNING CO-AUTHORS

PEN OPEN BOOKS AWARD WINNER

PEN USA NONFICTION BOOK AWARD FINALIST

Ten short stories written by Lily Hoang and Vi Khi Nao explore a range of styles from love stories to speculative fiction and fairy tales.

In this inventive collaboration, Hoang and Nao blend Vietnamese, English, and Vietlish, creating a fresh, dynamic voice that captures the complexity of the Vietnamese-American experience. Their stories dive into themes of generational trauma, identity, and cultural clash, offering everything from love stories pieced together from memory, to folklore and fantasy, to post-apocalyptic worlds where Vietnamese-American identities are reimagined.

Timber and Lua is playful, moving, and full of surprises. The authors experiment with language and translation, showing how meaning can shift and change between cultures. Released on the fiftieth anniversary of the Fall of Saigon, this collection is both a celebration of diasporic voices and a tribute to the power of storytelling across generations.

Lily Hoang is the author of nine books, including Underneath (winner of the Red Hen Press Fiction Award), A Bestiary (PEN/USA Nonfiction Award finalist), and Changing (recipient of a PEN/Open Books Award). She is a professor of literature at UC San Diego, where she teaches in their MFA in Literary Arts. She lives in San Diego, California.

Vi Khi Nao is the author of many books and is known for her work spanning poetry, fiction, theatre, film, and interdisciplinary collaborations, most recently The Italy Letters (Melville House) and The Six Tones of Water, coauthored with Sun Yung Shin (Ricochet). Recognized as a former Black Mountain Institute fellow, Vi Khi Nao received the Jim Duggins Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Prize in 2022. She lives in Iowa City, Iowa. https://www.vikhinao.com