Afterparties

A debut story collection about Cambodian-American life - immersive, comic and unsparing - by an indisputable talent.

WINNER OF THE JOHN LEONARD PRIZE AT THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARDS AND THE FERRO-GRUMLEY AWARD FOR LGBTQ FICTION
THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

'So's distinctive voice is ever-present: mellifluous, streetwise and slightly brash, at once cynical and bighearted.unique and quintessential' Sunday Times

'So's stories reimagine and reanimate the Central Valley, in the way that the polyglot stories in Bryan Washington's collection Lot reimagined Houston and Ocean Vuong's novel On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous allowed us to see Hartford in a fresh light.' Dwight Garner, New York Times

'[A] remarkable début collection' Hua Hsu, The New Yorker

A Roxane Gay's Audacious Book Club Pick!

Named a Best Book of Summer by: Wall Street Journal * Thrillist * Vogue * Lit Hub * Refinery29 * New York Observer * The Daily Beast * Time * BuzzFeed * Entertainment Weekly

Seamlessly transitioning between the absurd and the tender-hearted, balancing acerbic humour with sharp emotional depth, Afterparties offers an expansive portrait of the lives of Cambodian-Americans. As the children of refugees carve out radical new paths for themselves in California, they shoulder the inherited weight of the Khmer Rouge genocide and grapple with the complexities of race, sexuality, friendship and family.

A high school badminton coach and failing grocery store owner tries to relive his glory days by beating a rising star teenage player. Two drunken brothers attend a wedding afterparty and hatch a plan to expose their shady uncle's snubbing of the bride and groom. A queer love affair sparks between an older tech entrepreneur trying to launch a 'safe space' app and a disillusioned young teacher obsessed with Moby-Dick. And in the sweeping final story, a nine-year-old child learns that his mother survived a racist school shooter.

With nuanced emotional precision, gritty humour and compassionate insight into the intimacy of queer and immigrant communities, the stories in Afterparties deliver an explosive introduction to the work of Anthony Veasna So.

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