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Credit R. Kikuo Johnson
In The New York Times Book Review, Chris Abani reviews Vu Tran’s debut novel, “Dragonfish,” about a cop searching for his ex-wife, a haunted Vietnamese immigrant, in the sleazy depths of Las Vegas. Mr. Abani writes:
Exploiting the robust structures of the crime novel, American writers have tried for nearly a century to pursue unsettling questions of self, country and law. In the early novels of Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and Chester Himes — and later in the beautifully complicated novels of Walter Mosley — we find attempts to come to an uneasy settlement. (So too in certain movies: “Chinatown” comes to mind.) Like his predecessors, Tran sets about writing a novel of transformation and redemption that is anything but easy.
On this week’s podcast, Mr. Tran discusses “Dragonfish”; Alexandra Alter has news from the publishing world; Ruth Franklin talks about Lucia Berlin’s “A Manual for Cleaning Women”; listeners share what they’ve been reading; and Gregory Cowles has best-seller news. Pamela Paul is the host.