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Seven Stories Press

Works of Radical Imagination

Book cover for Love Like Hate
Book cover for Love Like HateBook cover for Love Like HateBook cover for Love Like Hate

Balcones Literary Prize, 2011

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 elan of Italo Calvino.

Book cover for Love Like Hate
Book cover for Love Like HateBook cover for Love Like HateBook cover for Love Like Hate

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“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.”

“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.”

“Dinh reveals a refreshing sense of utter irreverence and experimental fun. A definite must-read.”

Love Like Hate is [Dinh's] first novel, and a pleasure to read – the voice, words, and characters are as carefully crafted as a work poem or a short story … If I were teaching high school, this is a book I'd assign to my students.”

“At once caustic and humorous, harshly critical and nostalgic, Dinh's overview of his homeland is unfailingly honest.”

Linh Dinh

A recipient of a Pew Foundation grant, a David T. Wong Fellowship, a Lannan Residency and, most recently, the Asian American Literary Award, LINH DINH was born in Saigon in 1963 and emigrated to the United States in 1975. An acclaimed and provocative writer of short stories and contemporary fables, he is also the author of several books of poems and stories, including Postcards from the End of America and Fake House, as well as a novel, Love Like Hate. Linh has edited the anthologies Night, Again: Contemporary Fiction from Vietnam and Three Vietnamese Poets. His collection of stories, Blood and Soap, was chosen by the Village Voice as one of the Best Books of 2004. Linh's nonfiction essays have been published regularly at Unz Review, LewRockwell, Intrepid Report and CounterCurrents, and his blog, Postcards from the End of America (linhdinhphotos.blogspot.com), is followed by thousands of readers. He has also published widely in Vietnamese.