Linh Dinh and Cihan Kaan create landscapes where Coney Island meets Mars, post-war Saigon backdrops lovelorn characters, and rich boys pay to be Muslim for a day. In Love Like Hate, Linh Dinh, who writer Ed Park calls “one of the secret masters of short fiction,” uses his deadpan humor to explore family dysfunction and Saigon in the last half of the 20th century. In Halal Pork and Other Stories, Kaan spins five urban Sufi tales in the swirling graffiti of Brooklyn, creating an avant-garde, post-9/11 world from the perspective of a young Muslim New Yorker. As Moustafa Bayoumi says about this debut: “What do you mean you’d never even thought about reading American Tatar Turkish Russian Muslim immigrant Brooklyn post-colonial sci-fi punk-rock short fiction before?”

Linh Dinh was born in Saigon, Vietnam in 1963, came to the US in 1975. He is the author of two collections of stories, Fake House and Blood and Soap, and three books of poems, All Around What Empties Out, American Tatts,and Borderless Bodies. His work has been collected inBest American Poetry 2000, Best American Poetry 2004,and Great American Prose Poems from Poe to the Present, among other anthologies. He is also the editor of the anthologiesNight, Again: Contemporary Fiction from Vietnam and Three Vietnamese Poets, and translator of Night, Fish and Charlie Parker:The Poetry of Phan Nhien Hao.

Cihan Kaan is a Texas-born, Brooklyn-raised writer and filmmaker. A multi-talented artist, his first work of video art premiered as part of an ensemble show at MoMA at the age of 17. By 21, Cihan (pronounced Je’han) Kaan had directed several music videos in rotation on MTV. His short films She’s Got an Atomic Bomb and Shuffle Mode have won multiple awards. His book, Halal Pork and Other Stories, can be described as a collection of urban Sufi myths from the streets of New York City. His day job is in interactive digital media. He is the first American fiction author of Crimean Tatar descent.

$5 suggested donation. This event is open to the public.