Other Moons: Vietnamese Short Stories of the American War and Its Aftermath
Quan Manh Ha and Joseph Babcock (Translators and editors)
Columbia University Press: 2020
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Collections of translated short fiction by multiple authors ought to be assessed in at least two ways. As with all translations, they must be evaluated based on their linguistic and literary merits. But as a set selected to illustrate a general literary phenomenon, they should also be judged on their curation: what they include and exclude. A careless approach to selection can raise serious questions about a volume’s thematic coherence, ideological slant or subtextual agenda. For an obvious example, imagine a beautifully translated book of ‘recent American short stories’ that features only male writers or only white writers or only writers who live in Brooklyn.

• Tags: Issue 24, Joseph Babcock, Peter Zinoman, Quan Manh Ha, Vietman