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Winner of the Avery Jules Hopwood
Award and the Andrea Beauchamp Prize
Named the David TK Wong Fellow in the School of American Studies
at the University of East Anglia in Norwich for 2004-2005
A glorious fiction debut written with exceptional
acuity by an award-winning twenty-five-year-old Thai-American
writer
Sightseeing is a masterful new
work of fiction, a collection of stories set in contemporary
Thailand and written with a grace and sophistication that
belie the age of its young author. These are generous, tender
tales of family bonds, youthful romance, generational conflicts,
and cultural shiftings beneath the glossy surface of a warm,
Edenic setting. Rattawut Lapcharoensap offers a diverse, humorous,
and deeply affectionate view of life in a small Southeast
Asian country that is inevitably absorbing the waves of encroaching
Westernization.
In the prizewinning opening story, "Farangs,"
the young son of a modest beachside motel owner commits the
cardinal sin of falling for a pretty tourist, and the confrontation
that ensues between the native boy and the girl's pompous
American boyfriend culminates wondrously amid flying mangoes
and Clint Eastwood-a pet pig-swimming out to sea. In "Sightseeing,"
the much-anticipated holiday of a young man about to leave
for college and his loving and fiercely independent mother
becomes a different kind of pilgrimage altogether when they
are forced to confront the mother's impending blindness. The
concluding novella, "Cockfighter," is a triumph
of storytelling in which a young girl witnesses her proud
father's valiant but foolhardy and drawn-out battle against
the local delinquent and violent hoodlum whose family's vicious
stranglehold on the villagers has passed down unchecked through
generations.
Through his vivid assemblage of parents
and children, natives and transients, ardent lovers and sworn
enemies, Lapcharoensap dares us to look with new eyes at the
circumstances that shape our views and the prejudices that
form our blind spots. Gorgeous and lush, painful and candid,
Sightseeing is an extraordinary reading experience,
one that powerfully reveals that when it comes to how we respond
to pain, anger, hurt, and love, no place is too far from home.
Rattawut Lapcharoensap
was born in Chicago and raised in Bangkok. He was educated
at Triamudomsuksa Pattanakarn, Cornell University, and the
University of Michigan, where he received an MFA in creative
writing.
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