Timber & Lua

Timber & Lụa exists in duality as both original, innovative collaboration between Lily Hoàng and Vi Khi Nào and their primarily self-translations of said work. Comprised of ten short experimental stories, Timber & Lụa is written in three different languages: Vietlish, Vietnamese, and English. Similar to Samuel Beckett and Vladimir Nabokov, who translated their own work (from English to French and from Russian to English, respectively), Hoàng and Nào extend that makeshift “tradition” by hybridizing their translation to graft the genetic material of one language (English) and the genetic material of another language (Vietnamese) to produce a new literary diasporic genre. From love story to the speculative to fairy tale, these ten stories accentuate Hoàng and Nào’s dynamic, eccentric range. Timber & Lụa coincides with the fiftieth anniversary of the Fall of Saigon (1975–2025), as a diasporic literary contribution and commemorative celebration.

ADVANCED PRAISE

“Reading Timber & Lụa by Vi Khi Nào & Lily Hoàng, I am reminded of Junot Díaz’s extensive use of footnotes in The Brief Wondrous life of Oscar Wao, how he deftly managed to insert another set of perspective into the main story through these notes, and how one is given two stories, both at once. Timber & Lụa, which in essence is a bilingual collection of stories that oscillates between English and Vietnamese, is a daring an experimental feast, and it surely demands work from the readers. But I promise you, if you’re willing to do the work, you’ll be close to the xương và tủy (bone and marrow) of the Vietnamese American story.”
—Andrew Lam, author of Stories from the Edge of the Sea