"Stories from the Edge of the Sea" with Author Andrew Lam

Award-winning journalist and author Andrew Lam presents from his recently published collection of short fiction Stories from the Edge of the Sea.

Stories from the Edge of the Sea by Andrew Lam

At times humorous and ecstatic, other times poetic and elegiac, the fourteen pieces in Stories from the Edge of the Sea explore love and loss, lust and grief, longing and heartbreaks through the lives of Vietnamese immigrants and their children in California. A younger dancer is haunted by memories of almost dying on a boat when they escaped from Vietnam, a widow processes her husband’s death through frantic Facebook postings, a writer enters an old lover’s home and sees a ghost at twilight. If the human heart is a vast, open-ended terrain, then Andrew Lam’s short stories are its mountains, valleys, and lakes. Together they seek to chart a barely explored country.

Copies of the book will be available for purchase and signing by the author at this event!

Andrew Lam fled Vietnam with his family during the fall of Saigon in April 1975 when he was eleven years old. He attended the University of California, Berkeley, studying biochemistry, but abandoned plans for medical school after graduation. He entered the creative writing program at San Francisco State University instead. While still in school, he began writing for Pacific News Service and in 1993 won the Outstanding Young Journalist Award from the Society of Professional Journalists. He has written for many newspapers and magazines since, including National Geographic Traveler, Los Angeles Times Magazine, and The Nation. 

A regular commentator on NPR’s All Things Considered for over seven years, Lam is the author of three books and has won the PEN Open Book Award, the Josephine Miles Literary Award, and many others. He served as a Journalism Fellow at Stanford from 2001 to 2002. In 2004 a PBS documentary about his life called My Journey Home, in which a film crew followed him back to Vietnam, was aired nationwide. Lam has lectured at many universities and colleges and taught as a writer-in-residence at San Jose State University from 2015 to 2016. He is working on a novel and a memoir about his childhood in Vietnam during the war.

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This program has been made possible by the support from Friends of the Santa Fe Public Library.