The Frangipani Hotel: Fiction - Paperback

by Violet Kupersmith (Author)

"[A] subversively clever debut collection . . . These stories--playful, angry, at times legitimately scary--demonstrate a subtlety of purpose that belies [Kupersmith's] youth."--The New York Times Book Review

"A series of magical, beautiful, modern stories, all based on traditional Vietnamese folktales, this is the product of a great writer who invokes the ghosts of the land that was left behind."--San Francisco Chronicle

"[A] sparkling debut. The stories in this collection by Violet Kupersmith fuse traditional Vietnamese ghost stories with the ghost of the Vietnam War and update them as they play out for those who remained in the country and those who fled. . . . These are stories written from wildly different perspectives, and yet the ghosts feel vitally familiar. There's a lightness of touch to these stories, which are playful and wise, an astonishing feat for a young writer who graduated from Mount Holyoke College three years ago."--Chicago Tribune (editor's choice)

"Violet Kupersmith has woven together culture, tradition, family, and ghosts to create a series of short stories that are as fresh as they are mesmerizing. These stories will haunt you long after the last words have drifted off the page."--Lisa See

"In this auspicious volume, Kupersmith has reshaped and womanhandled traditional Vietnamese folktales that her grandmother told her into a wildly energetic, present-tense fusillade of short stories. . . . In perhaps the most pungent story here, a young woman who works the graveyard shift stocking shelves at Kwon's World Grocery in suburban Houston befriends an old man she finds standing naked beside a Dumpster. His problem: He occasionally turns into a fourteen-foot python. 'I am just a very old man who is sometimes a python, ' the man tells the woman. 'But you, my child, are a creature far more complex.' One might suspect that Kupersmith, who is working on her first novel, is that creature."--Ben Dickinson, Elle

"[A] compelling brand of magic realism . . . enthralling stories . . . a collection teeming with detail and personality."--Asian Review of Books

"Chilling and lovely . . . Kupersmith has combined traditional storytelling with a post-modern sense of anxiety and darkness, and the result is captivating."--Bookreporter

"The stories shimmer with life. The heat and tumult of Vietnam's cities are palpable, and the awed wonderment of humans confronted with supernatural occurrences is artfully conveyed. These polished stories mark Kupersmith, who is in her early twenties, as one to watch."--Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Warning: [The Frangipani Hotel] might haunt you. . . . Young Kupersmith, not yet twenty-five years old, seems to be channeling the literary spirit of Isak Dinesen in these Vietnamese tales as they morphed into completely up-to-date short stories. . . . Kupersmith has the same ability as Dinesen's to turn ordinary events into magical dreamworlds, sometimes even before the reader notices the shift. . . . These short stories originated in tales her Vietnamese grandmother told Kupersmith throughout her childhood. They take place now, in Vietnam and in Houston, with cellphones, low-level Texas hoodlums and drowned water sprites coexisting with ghosts returning from times long past. The naked seventy-year-old man hiding behind a Houston convenience store worries about a frightening metamorphosis he undergoes with increasing frequency."--The Buffalo News

"Surgically precise and feverishly imaginative."--Téa Obreht, author of The Tiger's Wife

"What is most haunting in Kupersmith's nine multilayered pieces are not the specters, whose tales are revealed as stories within stories, but the lingering loss and disconnect endured by the still living. . . . [A] mature-beyond-her-years debut."-

Author Biography

Violet Kupersmith graduated from Mount Holyoke College in 2011 and then spent a year in Vietnam on a Fulbright teaching fellowship. She is currently at work on a novel.