Postcards From The End Of America

(Paperback)

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Roaming the country by bus and train, on a budget, Linh Dinh set out to document what life is like for people. From Los Angeles, Cheyenne, Portland and New Orleans, to Jackson and Wolf Point - Linh walked miles and miles through unfamiliar neighbourhoods, talking to whoever would talk to him: the homeless, the peddlers, the protestors, the public preachers, the sex workers. With an uncompromising eye and indomitable, forthright prose, Dinh documents the appalling and the absurd with warmth and honesty, giving voice to America's often forgotten citizens.

Reviews

"Linh Dinh'sPostcards from the End of Americais a collection of some of the most brilliant observations penned on the terminal decline of the American empire. He gives a voice to those rendered invisible by a bankrupt corporate press. He has an unflinching honesty, refusing to romanticize the poor while also writing with great empathy about their lives. He lays bare the predatory evil of corporate capitalism, the death of liberty engendered by our security and surveillance state and the human cost of our system of inverted totalitarianism. He would make George Orwell or Joseph Roth proud. There are few writers in America I admire more."Chris Hedges, author ofWages of Rebellion: The Moral Imperative of Revolt

"LinhDinhs Postcards From the End of America, which chronicles a declining America through the authors travels among the down and out. Perhaps many liberal and leftist writers think they should reach out to this part of our country, butLinhDinhis one of the few to do it." Viet Thanh Nguyen, answering "What do you plan to read next" in TheNew York Times Book Review

"If this nations ego is represented by the politicians, then its collective unconscious is riding in the seat next to Linh Dinhs on the Greyhound bus, or slumping on the neighboring stool in the dive bar. In thesewhat do we call them new-journalist epistles prose poems revelatory philippics absurdist love lettersDinh introduces us to the legion of people not encompassed by any candidates plan for economic recovery. This book is a howl of joy and a laugh of despair." Matthew Sharpe,author ofJamestownandThe Sleeping Father

"In today's celebrity-obsessed culture so focused on the antics of the wealthy and the famous, Linh Dinh stands as one of the only chroniclers of the gritty underside of our society, a very worthy successor to Jacob Riis of New York City's Gilded Age. In our increasingly impoverished country, if you want to understand the life of the other halfor the other two-thirdsthere are few better guides to the texture of those dismal streets and alleys thanPostcards from the End of America." Ron Unz,Silicon Valley entrepreneur and publisher ofThe Unz Review


Linh Dinh is already one of the secret masters of short fiction. Ed Park, editor of the Believer and author of Personal Days


Dinh's abrupt epiphanies mix ADD with Thoreau's economy, Calvino's globe-trotting, and a pungent eroticism reminiscent of Kawabata'sPalm-of-the-Hand Stories. Village Voice

Author Bio

LINH DINH's lyrical works have spanned a number of genres and forms without ever losing the wit, dark humor, and unabashed politics that permeate his oeuvre. He is the author of two collections of stories and a novel published by Seven Stories Press--Fake House, Blood and Soap (one of the Village Voice's Best Books of 2004), and Love Like Hate, respectively--and five books of poems--All Around What Empties Out, American Tatts, Borderless Bodies, Jam Alerts, Some Kind of Cheese Orgy. He is the recipient of a Pew Foundation grant, the David T. Wong Fellowship, a Lannan Residency, and the Asian American Literary Award. He is also the editor of the anthologies Night, Again- Contemporary Fiction from Vietnam and Three Vietnamese Poets, and translator of Night, Fish and Charlie Parker- The Poetry of Phan Nhien Hao. Linh's nonfiction essays have been published regularly at Information Clearing House, Intrepid Reports, 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.