The Frangipani Hotel
Ghost stories that grapple with the legacy of the Vietnam War.
“A series of magical, beautiful, modern stories, all based on traditional Vietnamese folktales, this is the product of a great writer who invokes the ghosts of the land that was left behind.”
“What is most haunting in Kupersmith’s nine multilayered pieces are not the specters, whose tales are revealed as stories within stories, but the lingering loss and disconnect endured by the still living. . . . [A] mature-beyond-her-years debut.”
“Chilling and lovely… Kupersmith has combined traditional storytelling with a post-modern sense of anxiety and darkness, and the result is captivating.”
“The stories shimmer with life. The heat and tumult of Vietnam’s cities are palpable, and the awed wonderment of humans confronted with supernatural occurrences is artfully conveyed. These polished stories mark Kupersmith, who is in her early twenties, as one to watch.”
“Violet Kupersmith writes about both the Old World and the New World with an understanding beyond her years. These stories weave beautifully together to give us a rich tapestry of human history, and present an exciting new voice.”
Order
The Frangipani Hotel
A beautiful young woman appears fully dressed in an overflowing bathtub at the Frangipani Hotel in Hanoi. A jaded teenage girl in Houston befriends an older Vietnamese gentleman she discovers naked behind a dumpster. A trucker in Saigon is asked to drive a dying young man home to his village. A plump Vietnamese-American teenager is sent to her elderly grandmother in Ho Chi Minh City to lose weight, only to be lured out of the house by the wafting aroma of freshly baked bread. In these evocative and always surprising stories, the supernatural coexists with the mundane lives of characters who struggle against the burdens of the past.
Based on traditional Vietnamese folk tales told to Kupersmith by her grandmother, these fantastical, chilling, and thoroughly contemporary stories are a boldly original exploration of Vietnamese culture, addressing both the immigrant experience and the lives of those who remained behind. Lurking in the background of them all is a larger ghost—that of the Vietnam War, whose legacy continues to haunt us.
“[A] sparkling debut. The stories in this collection by Violet Kupersmith fuse traditional Vietnamese ghost stories with the ghost of the Vietnam War and update them as they play out for those who remained in the country and those who fled. . . . These are stories written from wildly different perspectives, and yet the ghosts feel vitally familiar. There’s a lightness of touch to these stories, which are playful and wise, an astonishing feat for a young writer who graduated from Mount Holyoke College three years ago.”
