Behind the Red Mist gives us for the first time in English a wide range of stories from the most important writer of the post-war generation in Vietnam. The characters range from a party official who turns into a goat while watching porno movies, to an Indian who carries his mother's bones in his knapsack, to a war widow trying desperately to piece together her life through the fragments of debris she collects from her back yard. The title novella "Behind the Red Mist" is a Vietnamese "Back To the Future", a social satire in which a young man in the Hanoi of the eighties receives an electric shock and is transported back to his same apartment block in 1967 wartime Vietnam during the American bombing. He not only witnesses the war with the eyes of someone who knows its outcome, but participates in his parents' courtship and discovers some truths about the generation held up to his own as a role model.

 

These stories represent the "second wave" of fiction—works about the aftermath of the Vietnam conflict as it moved into both countries, touching and forever changing not only the veterans, but also their families and their societies. Contributors include John Edgar Wideman, Larry Brown, Robert Olen Butler, Philip Caputo, Bobbie Ann Mason, Ngo Tu Lap, Tim O'Brien, and others.

This collection of 14 stories—each a harrowing sketch of the Vietnam War and its aftermath—offers American readers a glimpse of familiar territory, but from an unfamiliar perspective. Often writing from a young woman's point of view, Le Minh Khue, a war veteran who served in the Youth Volunteers Brigade, uses simple, understated prose to describe numbing horrors. Her stories explore themes such as love and war, the tangles of family relationships, and the complexities of post-war life. Khue gives readers a look into Vietnam before, during, and after the war with the United States. 

The Stars, the Earth, the River contains an excellent introduction by the translators, grounding the stories in Le Minh Khue's personal history. You simultaneously feel the rage of the author and the narrator when Khue disparagingly notes that the conversations around her center on luxuries, motor scooters, and business deals. Of what use, these stories ask, is such suffering? How can a culture honor the losses of war?

The Wished For Country is set during the founding of the Maryland colony in the mid-seventeenth century. It traces the entwined lives of James Hallam, a carpenter and indentured servant; Ezekiel, an African slave brought to Maryland from Barbados; and Tawzin, a Piscataway Indian, kidnapped to England when a child, and now back in America. While Hallam goes on to become a soldier and a player in the politics of the Maryland colony, Ezekiel and Tawzin become the center of an outcast group of Blacks, poor whites, and Native Americans, who find themselves striving to reinvent themselves and their world.

The stories of these three men, the women who love them, and the community they form, bring to vivid life the experiences of those who came to America pulled by a dream of what could be shaped from an emptiness that embodied promise, of those who were unwillingly brought to be the instruments of that dream, and of those who saw the shape of their world forever changed by the coming of the Europeans.