Nam Le and Lindsay Garbutt on Language as an Ecology of Violence and Corruption, the Pain of Being a Writer, and the Value of Uncertainty

On this episode, Lindsay Garbutt speaks with Nam Le, whose debut book, the short story collection The Boat, was translated into fourteen languages and received over a dozen major awards. We hear poems from his much anticipated first poetry collection, 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem, out from Knopf this year. The book is incredibly polyvocal, unpredictable, and intimate, yet also politically scathing. Garbutt and Le get into the inherent violence of language and how slippage and ambiguity might be the only way toward truth.

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