Author Khai Don is a name that is not unfamiliar to readers who love contemporary literature, especially through works in the genre of profound writing and prose.
Returning in 2025, author Khai Don tried her hand at short stories for the first time, a genre rich in experience, marking a bold change in her creative journey.
In his first time knocking on the door of the short story genre, Khai Don did not choose a safe step. Puppet Singer in the Far Forest is a bold and quiet collection of stories, where the female author becomes involved in a region that is both vague and overwhelming people, nature and soul drift together like shapeless smoke and fog.
Not simply a collection of short stories, Puppet Sings in the Far Forest does not follow a linear narration but is like pieces of debris falling from the mind - sometimes sweet, sometimes fierce, sometimes wild like an abandoned dream.
Some stories are dry and cold urban paintings; some are the wild echoes of nature being devastated; there are also stories of the sparkling slices of the soul in the face of the silent cracks.
The 14 short stories in the book are 14 "dream doors", a place in reality that is warped by the intense imagination and the cold beauty of the natural world. What author Khai Don wrote is not only about people, but also evokes forgotten parts in them - hidden darkness, wild desires, broken souls that have not been named.
According to Professor Chung Hoang Chuong: Through unusual stories, Khai Don attracts readers to situations that use their imagination to visualize nature, where people and the environment blend together. Daily stories, social frameworks with details that have never been deployed will be a very unique long trip.
With a strong, always- breaking pen, always threatening readers with a sense of disorientation, Khai Don has created a charming story space. There are no main characters, no typical storylines. There are only creatures drifting; there are no knots, only increasingly deep confusion. Each story is a dance of uncontrolled puppets, and their singing sound resounds like a call from the depths of loneliness.
A bold, powerful and different work, marking a new and challenging transformation of Khai Don on the map of contemporary Vietnamese literature.
Khai Don, real name Pham Lan Phuong - a journalist and writer. She is the author of many outstanding books in the genres of writing, essay, travel writing, and recently short stories.
Khai Don won the Virginia de Araujo Prize for poetry award presented by The Academy of American Poets in 2021 and 2022. Her works often explore the depth of personal psychology, loneliness, identity, memory and sense of Migration.
