An extraordinarily compelling debut--ghost stories that grapple
with the legacy of the Vietnam War
A beautiful young woman appears fully dressed in an overflowing
bathtub at the Frangipani Hotel in Hanoi. A jaded teenage girl in
Houston befriends an older Vietnamese gentleman she discovers naked
behind a dumpster. A trucker in Saigon is asked to drive a dying
young man home to his village. A plump Vietnamese-American teenager
is sent to her elderly grandmother in Ho Chi Minh City to lose
weight, only to be lured out of the house by the wafting aroma of
freshly baked bread. In these evocative and always surprising
stories, the supernatural coexists with the mundane lives of
characters who struggle against the burdens of the past.
Based on traditional Vietnamese folk tales told to Kupersmith by
her grandmother, these fantastical, chilling, and thoroughly
contemporary stories are a boldly original exploration of
Vietnamese culture, addressing both the immigrant experience and
the lives of those who remained behind. Lurking in the background
of them all is a larger ghost--that of the Vietnam War, whose
legacy continues to haunt us.
Violet Kupersmith's voice is an exciting addition to the landscape
of American fiction. With tremendous depth and range, her stories
transcend their genre to make a wholly original statement about the
postwar experience.
Praise for "The Frangipani Hotel"
" "
" A] sparkling debut . . . These are stories written from wildly
different perspectives, and yet the ghosts feel vitally familiar.
There's a lightness of touch to these stories, which are playful
and wise, an astonishing feat for a young writer who graduated from
Mount Holyoke College three years ago."--"Chicago Tribune"
"In this auspicious volume, Kupersmith has reshaped and
womanhandled traditional Vietnamese folktales that her grandmother
told her into a wildly energetic, present-tense fusillade of short
stories. . . . In perhaps the most pungent story here, a young
woman who works the graveyard shift stocking shelves at Kwon's
World Grocery in suburban Houston befriends an old man she finds
standing naked beside a Dumpster. His problem: He occasionally
turns into a fourteen-foot python. 'I am just a very old man who is
sometimes a python, ' the man tells the woman. 'But you, my child,
are a creature far more complex.' One might suspect that
Kupersmith, who is working on her first novel, is that
creature."--Ben Dickinson, "Elle"
"Violet Kupersmith has woven together culture, tradition, family,
and ghosts to create a series of short stories that are as fresh as
they are mesmerizing. These stories will haunt you long after the
last words have drifted off the page."--Lisa See
"Surgically precise and feverishly imaginative."--Tea Obreht,
author of "The Tiger's Wife"
"What is most haunting in Kupersmith's nine multilayered pieces are
not the specters, whose tales are revealed as stories within
stories, but the lingering loss and disconnect endured by the still
living. . . . A] mature-beyond-her-years debut."--"Library Journal
"(starred review)
"These polished stories mark Kupersmith, who is in her early
twenties, as one to watch."--"Publishers Weekly" (starred review)
"Each of the stories is replete with characters both fabulous and
ordinary, stories out of this world and firmly rooted in it. Each
is meticulously told by a storyteller talented and wise beyond her
years."--"Shelf Awareness"
"From the Hardcover edition."
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