Edgy and hard-hitting, pure and sublime, Blood and Soap is award-winning Linh Dinh's newest collection of short stories. Dinh's incisive, tightly woven prose peeks into the extraordinary lives of men and women in Vietnam, America and Europe. Here are ghost stories of a haunted Vietnamese hotel and wildly clever parables concerning a rich man and his poor friend. The meaning of true freedom and independence are explored when a white Southerner in 19th-century America swaps roles with his slave. A young man in Vietnam becomes obsessed with an invented language and poses as an English teacher. A New Yorker watches his neighbor practice English by shouting headlines from tabloids. A convicted serial killer examines his relationship with women, while his cellmate views his wife's murder and his subsequent imprisonment as the fulfillment of destiny. A "happy couple" exchanges pleasantries during the day but are abusive in their sleep.

Artist and writer Linh Dinh was born in 1963 in Saigon, and came to the U.S. in 1975. He gained literary recognition as the author of an acclaimed chapbook of poems, Drunkard Boxing and as the editor of the award-winning collection of Vietnamese fiction Night, Again (Seven Stories Press, 1996). His poems, fiction, reviews and translations have appeared in Sulfur, American Poetry Review, and Denver Quarterly. In 1993, he was awarded the Pew Fellowship for poetry. His prose poem "The Most Beautiful Word" was anthologized in The Best American Poems of 2000.

"Not only are these stories, almost without exception, very strong on purely literary grounds, but they also provide an invaluable firsthand documentation of a society undergoing rapid change."-The Times Literary Supplement

"Unsentimental and sensual, the stories in Night, Again are imbued with sly wit and haunting music. The range of style and subject matter is impressive. Out of the ruins of war, these living writers demonstrate their profound resilience, poetic vision, and luminous artistry."-Jessica Hagedorn

"Carefully chosen stories from writers whose styles and subject matter exhibit real range. . . . [T]hese pieces suggest a nuanced and decidedly polyvalent view of Vietnam."-A. Magazine

"A forceful and stunning compendium by a talented editor, Night, Again is unquestionably one of the finest literary entries in years from the new Asia and is essential for modern Asia-Pacific collections."-Choice

Praised for its documentary importance and literary brilliance when it was first published in 1996 and now updated with two new stories, Night, Again offers us the unique opportunity to see the Vietnamese through their own eyes and surprises us with its playfully ironic portraits.

Awarded a Pew Fellowship in 1993 and hosted in Certaldo, Italy, as a guest of the International Parliament of Writers and of Cities of Asylum, Linh Dinh is an accomplished author, poet, and translator. He has written two collections of stories, Fake House and Blood and Soap, and two books of poems, All Around What Empties Out and American Tatts. His work has been anthologized in The Best American Poetry 2000, The Best American Poetry 2004, and Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present.