Run Me to Earth
Paul Yoon
Simon & Schuster: 2020
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Outside of books by Lao writers, Laos doesn’t often figure in literary historical fiction beyond Colin Cotterill’s Detective Siri series or novels like Adam Lewis Schroeder’s In the Fabled East. For decades the country was mentioned only briefly in fictional works such as John Le Carre’s The Honourable Schoolboy or pulpy action-adventure paperbacks. Southeast Asian fiction tends to be set in Thailand, Cambodia or Vietnam, building upon ground established in Graham Greene’s The Quiet American or The Ugly American by Eugene Burdick and William Lederer, who opted to create the fictional nation of Sarkhan to explore their ideas about coming conflicts in the region.

• Tags: Bryan Thao Worra, Issue 19, Laos, Paul Yoon