Notes To the Afterlife: Stories

"Duy’s imagination covers a lot of ground also. The 13 stories in her collection, Notes to the Afterlife, showcase a writer of striking range, and one who—like the filmmakers she champions—pushes and reconfigures the envelope of her form, in take after engagingly inventive take on the art of telling a story. One devastatingly moving strand of her work draws on her Vietnamese-American background, tracing the unforgettable journeys of her characters across continents and oceans and generations, through shifting identities, from war to expatriation and sometimes back home again. Yet Duy is not a writer who could ever be pigeonholed, herself, by a single identity, even one that carries a hyphen. Most of her stories are just out there on the frontier of a literate, stylish, now sensibility, but always in service of authentic emotion. In the haunting and tender litanies of “My Lover is a Former Fat Kid,” the narrator exposes herself, her shameful vulnerability, in the face of the not-so-secret folds of extra skin on a new boyfriend’s body. “Presumed Dead or on Vacation” tracks the unraveling of its protagonist’s quiet, reliable life after she and her neighbors in an apartment complex get the unsettling news about why their landlady’s failed to cash eight months of rent checks. “The Importance of Material Things” traces the development and demise of a marriage through a poignant catalogue of possessions with their transformed and transforming significance." - Ellen Lessor, Author of the Shoplifter's Apprentice