“These stories draw close connections between disparate cultures, Vietnam’s changing environments, and the American and Vietnamese people who engage on a different playing field than the war which brought them together in the past.” – Midwest Book Review
EastOver Press is proud to announce the publication of All the Rivers Flow into the Sea & Other Stories, a collection of short stories by Khanh Ha.
From Vietnam to America, this story collection, jewel-like, evocative, and layered, brings to readers a unique sense of love and passion alongside tragedy and darker themes of peril. The titular story features a love affair between an unlikely duo pushing against barely surmountable cultural barriers. In “The Yin-Yang Market,” magical realism and the beauty of innocence abounds in deep dark places, teeming with life and danger. “A Mute Girl’s Yarn” tells a magical coming-of-age story like sketches in a child’s fairy book.
Bringing together the damned, the unfit, the brave who succumb to the call of fate, All the Rivers Flow into the Sea is a great journey where redemption and human goodness arise out of violence and beauty to become part of an essential mercy.
All the Rivers Flow into the Sea was selected as a winner of the 2021 EastOver Prize for Fiction and received much advanced praise.
“All the Rivers Flow into the Sea is an extraordinary collection,” said Andrew X. Pham, winner of Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize and finalist of the The National Book Critics Circle Awards. “The stories are fully rendered and finely nuanced, populated with vibrant characters shaped by war or haunted by tragedy. Their voices are as vivid as the landscapes the author conjured, at once exotic yet intimately familiar, all bound by threads of love and compassion. This is one of those rare collections I would keep and read again.”
John Balaban, recipient of The Academy of American Poets’ Lamont Prize and William Carlos Williams Award, described the collection as “Lush with natural detail and alive with crisp dialogue, in an unforgettable journey where cultures clash in affairs of the heart.”
In a review for The US Review of Books, Mark Heisey wrote, “Ha writes with an intimacy not often seen. The small bits of these characters’ lives become filled with meaning and significance. His stories and sentences flow together slowly and then seamlessly become something powerful. The language he chooses isn’t so much flowery as precise and sharply detailed, reminiscent of Joyce’s epiphany or the satori moment from Japanese literature. Each story is its own being, yet the whole works together to become something larger, universal.”
Ha is the author of Flesh and The Demon Who Peddled Longing. He is a seven-time Pushcart nominee, finalist for the Mary McCarthy Prize, Many Voices Project, Prairie Schooner Book Prize, and The University of New Orleans Press Lab Prize. He is the recipient of the Sand Hills Prize for Best Fiction, the Robert Watson Literary Prize in Fiction, The Orison Anthology Award for Fiction, The James Knudsen Prize for Fiction, The C&R Press Fiction Prize, and The EastOver Fiction Prize. His new novel, Mrs. Rossi’s Dream, was named Best New Book by Booklist and a 2019 Foreword Reviews INDIES Silver Winner and Bronze Winner.
All the Rivers Flow into the Sea ▪ Khanh Ha ▪ Released June 7, 2022
Available now on: Bookshop.org ▪ Barnes & Noble ▪ Amazon
ISBN-13: 978-1-958094-02-0