In 1979, Nam Le's family left Vietnam for Australia, an experience that inspires the first and last stories in The Boat. In between, however, Le's imagination lays claim to the world. The Boat takes us from a tourist in Tehran to a teenage hit man in Colombia; from an ageing New York artist to a boy coming of age in a small Victorian fishing tow...
An explosive, devastating debut book of poetry from the acclaimed author of The Boat In his first international release since the award-winning, best-selling The Boat, Nam Le delivers a shot across the bow with a book-length poem that honors every convention of diasporic literature—in a virtuosic array of forms and registers—before shattering the form itself. In line with the works of Claudia Rankine, Cathy Park Hong, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, this book is an urgent, unsettling reckoning with identity—and the violence of identity. For Le, a Vietnamese refugee in the West, this means the assumed violence of racism, oppression, and historical trauma. But it also means the violence of that assumption. Of being always assumed to be outside one’s home, country, culture, or language. And the complex violence—for the diasporic writer who wants to address any of this—of language itself. Making use of multiple tones, moods, masks, and camouflages, Le’s poetic debut moves with unpredictable and destabilizing energy between the personal and the political. As self-indicting as it is scathing, hilarious as it is desperately moving, this is a singular, breakthrough book.
The Boat raises the bar for Australian writing.' Peter Craven, Heat 'Nam Le is . . . a disturber of the peace. 'Consider the subjects of his stories: a child assassin in Colombia ('Cartagena'), an ageing New York artist desperate for a reconciliation with his daughter ('Meeting Elise'), a boy's coming of age in a rough Victorian fishing town ('Halflead Bay'), before the first atomic bomb falls in Japan ('Hiroshima'), The suffocations of theocracy in Iran ('Tehran Calling'). This astonishing range is topped and tailed by accounts of the uneasy reunion of a young Vietnamese writer in America with his ex-soldier father, and by the title story – the escape of a group of exhausted refugees from the Vietcong in a wallowing boat. 'One might be permitted to think, after all this high seriousness and intensity, Nam Le can't do funny. But this criminally talented 29-year-old can do that as well.' Barry Oakley, Australian Literary Review 'Stunning' The Times 'A fearless new Australian voice that accepts no geographical limits: these are stories of leaping power and the most breath-taking grace and intimacy.' Helen Garner 'Wonderful stories that snarl and pant across our crazed world . . . an extraordinary performance. Nam Le is a heartbreaker, not easily forgotten.' Junot Diaz 'The fiction debut of the year.' James Ley, Australian Book Review 'The best book debut of 2008.' New York Magazine 'The runaway literary success of 2008.' Weekend Australian
A Vintage Shorts “Short Story Month” Selection They call it an office job—being a sicario, a hit man—because the sicario is always waiting by the phone. In Medellín, Colombia, there’s always one more job to do. Juan Pablo Merendez is a young sicario just trying to get by, but when he’s summoned to meet his shadowy boss for the first time, all he wants is out—to Cartagena. “Cartagena” is a heart-pounding, urgent story of violence, unbreakable bonds, and tantalizing escape. From the collection The Boat, winner of the Dylan Thomas Prize and the Anisfield-Wolf Award—Nam Le’s masterfully ambitious globe-hopping debut, heralding the arrival of a remarkable new author. An eBook short.
Here was a very-much-alive half-Lebanese writer (from provincial Brisbane, no less) producing English-language writing of the very first order ... The poetry was in the prose; it stayed and sprung its rhythms, chorded its ideas, concentrated its images. Every other novel claims to be written in “poetic prose”; the real thing, when you come across it, is actually shocking. Nam Le takes the reader on a thrilling intellectual ride in this sharp, bold essay. Encompassing identity politics, metaphysics, the relationship between life and art, and the ‘Australianness’ of Malouf’s work, it is unlike anything else written about one of Australia’s most acclaimed writers. In the Writers on Writers series, leading writers reflect on another Australian writer who has inspired and fascinated them. Provocative and crisp, these books start a fresh conversation between past and present, shed new light on the craft of writing, and introduce some intriguing and talented authors and their work. Published by Black Inc. in association with the University of Melbourne and State Library Victoria.
A treasure trove of the finest Australian writing In this collection, acclaimed writer Mandy Sayer brings together nine of the best Australian examples of the long story - tales that combine the intensity of the short story with the complexity of a novel. In these stories, characters grow up, hook up and break up, endure calamitous loss and discover delectable love, travel to faraway places and find themselves right back where they started. From the exotic to the familiar, the sensuous to the dangerous, these soaring flights of the imagination boldly traverse the vast terrain of human experience. Showcasing the talents of some of our most loved and awarded authors, this invigorating collection is an excellent introduction to an often overlooked art form, promising to enchant all lovers of Australian fiction. 'Serves as a reminder of the calibre of Australia's best writers.' The Age 'An impressive collection of stories by anybody's measure.' Weekend Australian
This book discusses the threats and impacts of flash floods in Vietnam on environmental, human, and socio-economic resources, and covers monitoring, forecasting, warning, urgent action plans, and prevention solutions. While the work focuses on cases in Vietnam, it is applicable to many regions in the world that experience flash flooding as a common occurrence. Through data collection, field surveys, and investigational statistics from a specialized group of authors, the book provides comprehensive background knowledge on flash floods, and a flash flood hazard map using remote sensing and GIS techniques that can be used to assess the likelihood and potential impacts of flash floods before vulnerable areas and populations can be threatened. The intended audience of this manuscript is people interested in the fields of weather, environment, and natural disasters. It will serve as a reference for environmental managers, administrators of disaster planning, and extreme weather scientists.
Consisting of two parts, the first part of this volume is an essentially self-contained exposition of the geometric aspects of local and global regularity theory for the Monge–Ampère and linearized Monge–Ampère equations. As an application, we solve the second boundary value problem of the prescribed affine mean curvature equation, which can be viewed as a coupling of the latter two equations. Of interest in its own right, the linearized Monge–Ampère equation also has deep connections and applications in analysis, fluid mechanics and geometry, including the semi-geostrophic equations in atmospheric flows, the affine maximal surface equation in affine geometry and the problem of finding Kahler metrics of constant scalar curvature in complex geometry. Among other topics, the second part provides a thorough exposition of the large time behavior and discounted approximation of Hamilton–Jacobi equations, which have received much attention in the last two decades, and a new approach to the subject, the nonlinear adjoint method, is introduced. The appendix offers a short introduction to the theory of viscosity solutions of first-order Hamilton–Jacobi equations.
Ultrashort pulses in mode-locked lasers are receiving focused attention from researchers looking to apply them in a variety of fields, from optical clock technology to measurements of the fundamental constants of nature and ultrahigh-speed optical communications. Ultrashort pulses are especially important for the next generation of ultrahigh-speed optical systems and networks operating at 100 Gbps per carrier. Ultra Fast Fiber Lasers: Principles and Applications with MATLAB® Models is a self-contained reference for engineers and others in the fields of applied photonics and optical communications. Covering both fundamentals and advanced research, this book includes both theoretical and experimental results. MATLAB files are included to provide a basic grounding in the simulation of the generation of short pulses and the propagation or circulation around nonlinear fiber rings. With its unique and extensive content, this volume— Covers fundamental principles involved in the generation of ultrashort pulses employing fiber ring lasers, particularly those that incorporate active optical modulators of amplitude or phase types Presents experimental techniques for the generation, detection, and characterization of ultrashort pulse sequences derived from several current schemes Describes the multiplication of ultrashort pulse sequences using the Talbot diffraction effects in the time domain via the use of highly dispersive media Discusses developments of multiple short pulses in the form of solitons binding together by phase states Elucidates the generation of short pulse sequences and multiple wavelength channels from a single fiber laser The most practical short pulse sources are always found in the form of guided wave photonic structures. This minimizes problems with alignment and eases coupling into fiber transmission systems. In meeting these requirements, fiber ring lasers operating in active mode serve well as suitable ultrashort pulse sources. It is only a matter of time before scientists building on this research develop the practical and easy-to-use applications that will make ultrahigh-speed optical systems universally available.
This book examines the significance of the cotton trade in the Mediterranean traffic in the Later Middle Ages and evaluates its effects on the economy of the Occident. It covers all aspects of the production of, commerce and trade in cotton. The merchants of Venice, Genoa, Barcelona and Florence played the most important role in the cotton trade in the Mediterranean. The massing of supplies of raw material by the merchants of the four maritime cities led to the mass fabrication of cotton products. In this way Western society saw a remarkable growth in the consumption of cotton products in the Later Middle Ages.
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