Seven books that put you in Laos. Two are by writers from Laos and set there: Mother's Beloved: Stories from Laos and I Little Slave: A Prison Memoir From Communist Laos. The other five are wider picks: books by long-time residents and outsiders who know the place well.
Very little Lao writing has reached English readers, and Mother's Beloved: Stories from Laos by Outhine Bounyavong was the first collection of Lao short stories published in English. Its fourteen stories of village and city life appear beside the Lao originals, making it the place to start. Bounsang Khamkeo's I Little Slave is a prison memoir of a re-education camp in northern Laos after the 1975 communist takeover.
Storytelling in Laos has long been oral, and Lao Folktales, collected in Vientiane by Steven Jay Epstein, gathers trickster tales of Xieng Mieng and animal fables. Voices from the Plain of Jars, collected by Fred Branfman, gives villagers' own accounts and drawings of the American bombing. Kao Kalia Yang, a Hmong American writer, traces her mother's life in Where Rivers Part, from a highland village through the Secret War to the Thai refugee camps.
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Fourteen short stories about Lao village and city life, printed in English alongside the Lao originals. It was the first collection of Lao short stories published in English.
A Lao author's account of imprisonment in a re-education camp after the 1975 communist takeover, showing harsh post-revolution life in northern Laos.
By long-time residents and outsiders who know the place well, or folk tales, poetry and history with a strong feel for Laos.
Oral testimony from Lao villagers on the Plain of Jars, in Xieng Khouang, describing life under the US bombing in the 1960s and 70s.
Traditional Lao tales of village life, Buddhist moral teaching, spirits and trickster figures such as Xieng Mieng, showing lowland Lao rural culture and values.
A crime mystery set in 1976 Vientiane, showing the early communist Pathet Lao era through an elderly reluctant coroner, Dr. Siri Paiboun.
Three orphaned teenagers survive the American bombing of Laos in the 1960s and 70s, running medical messages through the Plain of Jars region.
Traces a Hmong woman's life from highland Laos village childhood through the Secret War and flight across the Mekong to Thailand.
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