In Love Like Hate, Linh Dinh weaves a dysfunctional family saga that doubles as a portrait of Vietnam in the last half century. Protagonists Kim Lan and Hoang Long marry in Saigon during the Vietnam War, uniting in a setting that allows Dinh's dark, deadpan humor to flourish. Describing his mushrooming cast of characters in unsentimental and sometimes absurd ways, Dinh embraces contradictions with the surreal exuberance of Matthew Sharpe and the stylistic élan of Italo Calvino.
Read the first two chapters of Love Like Hate below:
The total effect of Blood and Soap is impossible to describe. . . . It owes a certain debt to Jorge Luis Borges, but uses Borgesian metafiction and genre-bending to depict a sense of absurdity, confusion, and displacement peculiar to being a contemporary world citizen.
- Matthew Sharpe
Love Like Hate
Village Voice
Dec 10, 2007
[Linh] Dinh’s abrupt epiphanies mix A.D.D. with Thoreau’s economy, Calvino’s globe-trotting, and a pungent eroticism reminiscent of Kawabata’s Palm-of-the-Hand Stories.
Love Like Hate
AsianWeek
Dec 10, 2007
Dinh reveals a refreshing sense of utter irreverence and experimental fun. A definite must-read.
Experts
Linh Dinh is already one of the secret masters of short fiction. Love Like Hate is something like a traditional cross-cultural novel that's been shocked into life by Dinh's uncanny ability to tell us stories we didn't even know we wanted to hear.
-Ed Park, editor of The Believer and author of Personal Days
Love Like Hate affirms that Linh Dinh's is one of the great original voices in American literature of the 21st century. The English language is a better, weirder, smarter place with Dinh writing in it.
-Matt Sharpe, author of Jamestown
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