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67,500 words
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Canada: McClelland & Stewart, Apr 2012
ABOUT YASUKO THANH
(Photo: Courtesy of the author)
Yasuko Thanh is most recently the 2009 winner of the annual Journey Prize for the best short story published in Canada. Yasuko has published her stories widely and travelled all over Europe and North America. She lives with her husband and two daughters in Victoria, British Columbia. Teddy’s Blow-Off Attraction is her first novel.
stories by Yasuko Thanh
INTRODUCING AN EXCITING NEW VOICE IN FICTION
- 'Suko Wrote a Book', by Hang Engel and his Island Devils
- 'Losing My Mind' - Yasuko performs with the Jukebox Jezebels
“Yasuko Thanh writes with a tiger’s eye for detail, her sentences haunt, images flash like lightning. She is a major talent.” — WAYSON CHOY
“A prize-winner well before the publication of her first book, Yasuko Thanh impresses above all with the thematic complexity of her approach. Coupling a globetrotter’s perspective and historical curiosity to that, her stories conjure vignettes of troubling existence, where change is possible but outcomes deviate far from plans.” — NATIONAL POST
“Using artfully simple language, Thanh has crafted a story of powerfully resonant emotion with tremendous restraint – a gift that respects both her characters and her readers.” — JOURNEY PRIZE JURY CITATION
“Yasuko Thanh is a one-of-a-kind writer who perfectly inhabits the voices of her characters, whether they’re living on the margins or in the shadows of history. No matter where her stories take us, Thanh’s prose shines with true, living detail.” — LEE HENDERSON
“A masterful first book: wise, capricious, moving, and exotic. Here’s a dexterous hand guiding characters we won’t soon forget. These stories show us the many routes of the heart.” — BILL GASTON
“Thanh’s stories arrive as advertised – afloat on gorgeous prose, populated by men and women who hover at edge of life’s grand transitions. A remarkable debut by an observant and talented writer.” — MICHAEL TURNER
In this sharply observed and erotically charged debut collection, Journey Prize winner Yasuko Thanh immerses us in the lives of people on the knife edge of desire and regret, hungry for change.
In “Her Vietnamese Boyfriend,” a story set in 1960s Germany that crackles with sexual tension, a young woman is sent to work for a farmer as a homemaker while his wife is away. In “His Lover’s Ghost,” a man is forced to confront his own fears about being left behind when his dying lover becomes convinced he is being visited by a ghost. In “Hunting in Spanish,” a woman in a Mexican resort town where anything goes pushes herself to the limits of love and despair. And in the Journey Prize-winning title story, “Floating Like the Dead,” a group of Chinese lepers at the turn of the twentieth century spend their last days dreaming of escape from exile on a remote island off the coast of Canada.
The characters in these stories are expats, outsiders, and outliers; yet in their struggles to be themselves and to belong, they remind us of our own deepest longings and desires. With this seductive and emotionally compelling collection, Yasuko Thanh announces herself as an exciting new voice in Canadian fiction.