**PLEASE NOTE THIS IS A VIRTUAL PROGRAM THAT WILL TAKE PLACE VIA ZOOM. Registrants will receive a link to access the Zoom Webinar via email.**

Andrew Lam discusses the fourteen pieces in Stories from the Edge of the Sea, exploring love and loss, lust and grief, longing and heartbreaks through the lives of Vietnamese immigrants and their children in California. 

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. “Andrew Lam’s Stories from The Edge of the Sea beautifully offers tales of longing, repression, and love as he recalls experiences of immigration and confronts the ruptures amidst generational memories. These stories are indelible, profound, and unforgettable.” —Lynn Novick, codirector of The Vietnam War 

About Andrew: Andrew Lam was born Lâm Quang Dũng in 1964 in South Vietnam. He was the son of General Lâm Quang Thi of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam.

Lam left Vietnam with his family during the fall of Saigon in April 1975. He attended the University of California, Berkeley, where he majored in biochemistry. He soon abandoned plans for medical school and entered a creative writing program at San Francisco State University. 

He is a journalist and short story writer. In 2005, he published a collection of essays, Perfume Dreams, about the problem of identity as a Vietnamese living in the U.S. He is a regular contributor to National Public Radio's All Things Considered. His second book, East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres is a meditation on east–west relations, and how Asian immigration changed the West. Birds of Paradise Lost, his third book, is a collection of short stories about Vietnamese newcomers struggling to remake their lives in the San Francisco Bay after a long, painful exodus from Vietnam. Lam blogs regularly on Huffington Post.

RECORDING NOTE: This program will be recorded. All registrants will receive the recording via email within 48 hours of the program.

Made possible by the Groton Public Library Endowment Trust.

Sign up directly via Zoom HERE!