What a brilliant collection of short stories. Not only did it educate me about the situation in Vietnam (in the past and the present) but it gave me beautiful prose to read.

20 short stories by various Vietnamese authors are translated and compiled into this anthology of the American War and its aftermath. 20 diverse and distinct voices. Each story had a preamble by the translator that gave us an understanding of who the author is and what they’re trying to convey through this story.

From stories about a dog who helped fight the war to a fantastical story where the author used cannibalism to symbolize getting eaten up by war to stories of love and mirth, the stories show the trials and tribulations that the people of the region went through during the war and even after.

The introduction to the anthology was surprisingly one of my favourites - it was in depth and informative but also not too lengthy. I appreciated that it was explained that they really did try to get as many diverse voices as possible be it in terms of gender to age to where they were from.

My favourite short stories were ‘Unsung Hero’ (which made me bawl), ‘Birds in Formation’, ‘The Most Beautiful Girl In The Village’, ‘The Storm’, ‘Love and War’, ‘Out of the Laughing Woods’ and ‘A Moral Murderer’.

Thanks to NetGalley and Columbia University Press for sharing this ARC with me in exchange for my honest review.

A beautiful anthology of stories set during the Vietnam War, I really enjoyed this one. Like all anthologies and collection, there were some stories that I loved and some I snoozed over.

Perhaps it's the fact that I don't read war stories often but this one covered so many aspects of the war from those directly affected by the war with PTSD, bodily injuries and health risks, to those indirectly affected by the war, like mothers and wives and inhabitants of towns that the war will go through.

My favourite story has to be the first one in the collection, "Unsung Hero", about a dog who soldiers encounter during deployment and who subsequently keeps the soldiers company, grounded and human. I also really enjoyed "Love and War", one of the shortest in the collection with essences of magical realism and fantasy about a man who thinks he lives with a cannibal because he keeps waking up losing body parts. On a deeper level, this is, of course, about bodily injuries from the war.

I also often don't read works in translation but I know for a fact that this anthology is special because, for the first time, wars from the Vietnam war will finally be accessible to Anglophone readers! I found the translated version so beautiful, melancholy and lyrical.

This collection is an interesting insight in the Vietnamese writings about the aftermath of the War. Impressing is the general absence of the enemy. War in itself is the issue, not what the enemy did to the country. The collection doesn't openly take sides for the North or South. The only Americans mentioned aren't hostile but very friendly and helping.

These are stories that need to be dusted off from where Americans have buried their consciences about this war, and widely distributed. Sadly, I first learned more about the Vietnam War (or should I say, the American War) when I visited Vietnam last year, and it was heartbreaking to learn about what our country did, not when I was in grade school, but as an adult. That's unacceptable. As an English teacher, I believe words and stories hold incredible power, and this collection is a way for the average American to learn more about the truth of this war.