Twelve years ago, Andrew Lam, a writer and journalist who left Vietnam as “a plane person” at the end of the Vietnam War at the age of eleven, published Birds of Paradise Lost (2013), his first short-story collection. His current collection, Stories from the Edge of the Sea, and the focus of this review, is just as varied and unique as the first, alternating between the tragic and the humorous, the romantic and the gothic, sometimes in the same story. Though not all the stories possess a clarity of effect, others leave a deep impression, offering glints of the wisdom Lam has derived from a life of philosophical wandering. His intention as stated in the foreword, “to try to heal—to retrieve those fragments as best I can—one story at a time,” unifies the collection…