All the Rivers Flow into the Sea and Other Stories by Khanh Ha
Publisher: Eastover Press LLC (June 7, 2022)
Category: Short Stories, Literary Fiction, Historical Fiction, Vietnam
Tour dates: July 25-August 31, 2022
ISBN: 978-1958094020
Available in Print and ebook, 208 pages
Description All the Rivers Flow into the Sea 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 has received much advanced praise.
Praise All the Rivers Flow into the Sea by Khanh Ha
“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
“All the Rivers Flow into the Sea is an extraordinary collection. 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.”—Andrew X. Pham, winner of Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize and finalist of the The National Book Critics Circle Awards.
“Lush with natural detail and alive with crisp dialogue, in an unforgettable journey where cultures clash in affairs of the heart.”—John Balaban, recipient of The Academy of American Poets’ Lamont Prizeand William Carlos Williams Award
“Khanh Ha’s writing brings to the page love and passion mixed with the darkness of harrowing tragedy. The author plays with the emotions of the reader as he integrates lighter themes in times of darkness and, at times, infuses darkness into a seemingly lighter-themed story. I recommend this book for its character-driven stories and poetic lilt. All the Rivers Flow Into The Sea & Other Stories is a beautiful anthology of stories of love, passion, and kindness infused with the tragedy of war.”—Readers’ Favorite (5-star)
“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.”-The US Review of Books
Guest Post by Khanh Ha
“Short Story Writing”
When writing short stories, you work in a confined space; so, everything should be concise and economical, much like journalism writing. In short stories you deal with a small cast of characters and a small number of scenes. If you start out as a short-story writer then later on try your hand at writing novel, you will carry with you those virtues that you’ve acquired previously—being concise and economical. However, what you will learn in writing a novel is patience. Do not look forward to finishing it in three days. You will also learn to be the manager of a much larger cast of characters, to get to know them, and make them relatable to your readers.
If you start out as a novelist then later on try to write short stories, you must discard your bad habits you’ve acquired from writing a novel. You can’t ramble. You can’t repeat yourself. You can’t be redundant. (These are the vices from writing a novel!) There is a great adjustment you must make moving from novel to short story; but in the end you’ll come out a better writer. I must say a true writer is one who can write novels and short stories, and is equally good at both.
Short stories share the same principle of structure like novels, i.e., there is a beginning, a middle, and an ending. However, many short stories do not seem to honor that—they come to an end (at least in their authors’ minds) which often raises the reader’s brow: “Where’s the beef?” The end of a short story must have a climax, something that leaves the reader think for some time afterward. A strong ending is similar to “a punch in the gut.”
To be economical in writing short story is to honor the maxim “less is more.” To put it differently, you must exert self-restraint in the pathos so your readers have room to participate, to see, to feel what you intend for them. In fact, the art of writing is the aura of self-control.
Yet what makes a short story interesting? It’s always the characters. With literary fiction, you deal with characters more than with plots. You deal with spontaneity and the dynamics of characterization which shapes the story line. You don’t shoehorn your characters into a predetermined plot. Depth of characterization is the heart of literary writing in addition to the mood, the atmosphere, the ambience, and the prose.
Last, you must show and do not tell. Try this sentence: “When I look up, I saw a girl walking down the stairs in her long white dress. She was so beautiful she took my breath away.” Can you visualize how beautiful she is? If adjectives can do the work for a writer, he won’t have to do much. Just throw in the adjectives. Just tell and don’t show. Writers who take pains to bring their characters alive avoid using adjectives to convince readers. So, let’s try again with a different scene: “I took one look at the kitchen sink after the party and recoiled in disgust.” In fact, the kitchen sink will look disgusting to readers if you can describe it in such a way that they feel such disgust for themselves.
The truth is you should show your story to readers through scenes. It will give your writing the dynamic of visual and sense. However, there is a warning here about scene vs narrative. You don’t want to convert all your narratives into scenes. Isn’t it a paradox? What’s the reason? You must vary the rhythm of your writing. Scene after scene without a break will be exhausting. You need to change it up to slow things down, to give readers a chance to catch their breath.
So, what makes a short story interesting? First, the characters. They don’t have to be sympathetic, but they must be engaging, interesting, or wicked in a perverted way like Lester Ballard in Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God.
Next, the scenes. Each scene must have drama. Or it must set up drama. But more importantly, you have to be excited about the scenes you write. If you don’t feel excited about them, do you expect your readers to get excited when they read them?
Scenes that don’t have much drama are filled with trivialities, flat dialogue, which neither show much about characterization nor advance the plot. Consequently, they don’t sustain the story line, thus failing to hold interest.
Last, the setting. Setting is about the mood, the ambience, the atmosphere of a locale. Wherever the story is to occur, you must know about its locale, including its fauna and flora. Though the setting is an important aspect in any story, the mood that fosters the setting is even more important. It must be atmospheric. The setting is like a restaurant that you pick for a date. But the ambiance that brings the mood must be there.
What about your intended audience? When you conceive a story, you don’t imagine it for an audience. That will come much later when the readers arrive in your make-believe world. It may be a paper moon sailing over a cardboard sea, but if it allows a reader to enter another place and time, to him it is believable.
(c) Khanh Ha, 2022
About Khanh Ha
Multi award winning author, Khanh Ha is the author of Flesh, The Demon Who Peddled Longing, and Mrs. Rossi’s Dream. 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.
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 & Other Stories has already won the EastOver Fiction Prize.
Website: http://www.authorkhanhha.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/KhanhHa69784776
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/authorkhanhha
Giveaway All the Rivers Flow into the Sea by Khanh Ha
This giveaway is for 3 print copies and is open to the U.S. only. This giveaway ends on Aug 27, 2022 midnight, pacific time. Entries accepted via Rafflecopter only.
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