SINCE RELATIONS BETWEEN THE U.S. AND VIETNAM HAVE NORMALIZED, many more people are traveling to this exotic country, previously closed to a generation of Western visitors. Vietnam provides one of the first chances for Americans to know the Vietnamese outside the context of war. Vietnamese have been telling stories for thousands of years, in poetry and in song, in Chinese script and then in Vietnamese nôm, and more recently, in novels and short stories. These 17 stories, from contemporary Vietnamese writers living in Vietnam and abroad, take the literary traveler to extraordinary places: from the jungle-clad mountain ranges of the North to the mysterious silence of the old capital along the Perfume River. Travel to the raucous mayhem of Saigon where youngsters still circle the downtown in motorcycle promenades and where the reopened bars, caught in a time warp, play old Creedence Clearwater and Carlos Santana songs. Proximity of the spirit world, love of family, exhaustion from war, one’s Confucian, Taoist, and Buddhist obligations, social protest, and the hunger for a better life—these are some of the concerns to be encountered in these thrilling landscapes.

Whereabouts Press is an independent publisher of books that convey a sense of a place—a country, a region, a city—through stories. Unlike guidebooks written by professional travel writers, Travelers Literary Companions feature stories written by literary writers—all of whom are native to the places they write about. They didn’t write specifically for travelers. They wrote because they had good stories to tell. And their stories tell us not just about people, but about the soul of a place.