The Boat cover photo by Clifford Ross; cover design by Carol Devine Carson

Today is the long-anticipated United States’ release of Nam Le‘s first story collection: The Boat. (Australian, British, Canadian, German, Italian, and Netherlands editions are to rapidly follow the U.S. release.) Recent 2008 Pulitzer Prize winner Junot Diaz calls the book, “An extraordinary performance. Nam Le is a heartbreaker, not easily forgotten.” Charles D’Ambrosio–a stunning fiction writer himself–goes so far as to say, “The Boat is tremendous, challenging and ambitious, worthy of the same shelf that holds Dubliners and The Things They Carried.” And the notoriously difficult to please Michiko Kakutani at The New York Times calls the title piece, “a haunting marvel of a story that says as much about familial dreams and burdens as it does about the wages of history.”

Below is an excerpt of an interview with Le from the upcoming May 15 issue of Luna Park.

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EXCERPT OF NAM LE INTERVIEW / LUNA PARK 2

Luna Park: How were you first drawn to writing fiction professionally? Could you briefly explain how you moved from a lucrative career as a corporate lawyer to applying and getting in to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and having your stories then published in such acclaimed literary magazines as Zoetrope, A Public Space, Harvard Review, and One-Story? It would seem you are far from a dawdler—as a new reader to your work, I actually wonder when you have the time to sleep.

Nam Le: I don’t think I was ever drawn to writing fiction ‘professionally’; I was always drawn to writing, and, until a few years ago, I was drawn mainly to poetry. I started ‘seriously’ writing a novel (an appellation that really applies by the mere fact of so doing) during a one-year hiatus from the law. So I guess you could say I was drawn, during that time, to the pipedream of being able to write professionally. Iowa was a bit of luck and a lot of timing—I’d recently finished my novel and was back in Litigation and M&A when I read a review of an Australian book (John Murray’s A Few Short Notes on Tropical Butterflies—a fantastic collection) that mentioned the program. This was late 2003; I Googled it, was intrigued, realized the deadline was upon me, and sent off the first few chapters of my (since abandoned) novel on a whim. Dawdling?—man, I do plenty of that, I’ve just gotten so good at it now it looks like something else.

LP: Is there any relationship you have had with a literary magazine editor that has been more than usually helpful to you as a writer? Maybe not a Gordon Lish type, but someone who has maybe pushed you in directions you didn’t realize, or perhaps just helped clear up your work with remarkable skill?

NL: The first story I had taken was taken by Brigid Hughes of A Public Space—I’ll not soon forget that. The first story I had published was published by Michael Ray in Zoetrope: All-Story. Both are extraordinary editors: open-minded, meticulous, bold, assertive, learned. The most extensive and inspiring editorial exchanges I’ve enjoyed have been with Robin Desser, my editor at Knopf. She’s everything I didn’t dare hope for in an editor (and she would’ve slaughtered this sentence).

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The complete Luna Park interview with Nam Le will be available online here as part of Luna Park 2 on May 15.