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.
