Kind Words for H.V. Chao

January 31st, 2014 § 0 comments § permalink

H. V. Chao’s story “The Ark” placed in the Top 25 in Glimmer Train’s August 2013 Short Story Award for New Writers. Last time around, H.V. Chao placed in the Top 50 for Glimmer Train’s Best Start with “Jewel of the North,” so… getting closer! Congrats to all winners and placers!

Anne-Sylvie Homassel’s translation of H.V. Chao’s “Jewel of the North,” published in Le Visage Vert #19, got a nice comment from French spec fic critic and blogger Nebal, who called it “disconcerting… cryptic and quite precious, to say the least, but also rich in beautiful images and disturbing ideas.”

Editor, publisher, and writer D.F. Lewis reviews the entirety of Strange Tales IV (ed. Rosalie Parker) from Tartarus Press, story by story. Of H.V. Chao’s “The Recovery,” he says

“This is highly poetic, yet accessible, prose, as if TS Eliot and Lawrence Durrell collaborated one day from within ordered chaos upon this staggeringly rarefied story… It is a threnody of conversations and lovers’ trysts overheard by a Somerset Maugham but one wonders between who with whom, like listening at that famous wall with Pyramus and Thisbe, until we hear another disturbing story ending that I dare not hint at…”

Lewis, whose first novel was published at the age of 63 (2011), is the creator of Nemonymous, and is unique in recording his impressions for reviews in “gestalt real-time.”

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