Book
Songs on Endless Repeat
Songs on Endless Repeat is a posthumous collection of essays and fiction by Anthony Veasna So, published in 2023.[1] It brings together previously published essays, unpublished and unfinished fiction, and portions of So's unfinished novel Straight Thru Cambotown.[2]
About the book
The chapters alternate between fiction and nonfiction, and each is labeled as one or the other. Jonathan Dee, who wrote the foreword, said the structure was meant to create a dialogue between So's two modes of writing.[1] Chapters from Straight Thru Cambotown make up roughly half of the book.[1][3]
Straight Thru Cambotown follows three Cambodian American cousins after the death of their aunt.[4] It is set partly in "Cambotown," a Cambodian community in Los Angeles County. The aunt, Peou, is the "Counter" of the "Circle of Money" and acts as a loan officer for the community. She dies in a car accident, and her death shifts the balance of power in Cambotown.[1] The Circle of Money is an illegal Ponzi scheme, and the story takes up conflict between ethnic groups and generations and struggles with sexual identity.[3]
The essays take up reality television, the film Crazy Rich Asians, So's move at Stanford from computer science classes to an art major, and the duplexes his father rented out in Stockton, California.[2][5] The book opens with a short fictional piece, "We Are All the Same Here, Us Cambos," whose narrator acts as a tour guide to Cambodian immigrant culture and to the difficulty of honoring the genocide without being defined by it.[3] In "Duplex," So sets his father's work as a property manager beside his own art studies at Stanford.[3] The final essay, "Baby Yeah," is about the suicide of a friend and the value of art. Its title comes from a song by the band Pavement, a B-side from a reissue of Slanted and Enchanted.[6] After his friend's death, So played the song over and over for an afternoon and a night.[3]
Publication and editions
Ecco Press published the book on December 5, 2023, in 240 pages.[4][1] It followed So's first book, Afterparties, and was his second posthumous release.[1] Jonathan Dee, So's former advisor in the Syracuse University MFA program, wrote the foreword. Straight Thru Cambotown began as So's graduate thesis at Syracuse.[7]
Several essays first appeared in n+1, The New Yorker, Ninth Letter and The Millions.[1][4] n+1 ran "Baby Yeah" and "Journey to a Land Free of White People", and The New Yorker ran "Duplex".[6][5]
The audiobook, read by Keong Sim, runs 418 minutes.[4]
Reception
Kirkus Reviews and Publishers Weekly gave the book starred reviews.[8] The publisher names it among the most anticipated books of 2023 chosen by the Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, The Millions, LitHub and Shondaland.[4] The Los Angeles Times praised So's humor and his picture of the double bind of being Asian American.[1] The Chicago Review of Books found in it a mix of sensitivity, humor and anger, with So moving in new directions.[3]
References 8
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 Los Angeles Times, review, December 4, 2023
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 Kirkus Reviews, Songs on Endless Repeat, September 9, 2023
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 Chicago Review of Books, Difference in Repetition, December 6, 2023
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 HarperCollins, Songs on Endless Repeat (undated)
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 The New Yorker, Duplex, July 5, 2021
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 n+1, Baby Yeah, Issue 39, Winter 2021
- ↑ Electric Literature, How Anthony Veasna So's Unfinished Novel "Straight Thru Cambotown" Became a Collection, January 11, 2024
- ↑ n+1 Shop, Songs on Endless Repeat (undated)
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