Showing results by author "Sonya Larson" in All Categories

To Chinese American teenager Chuntao, New Lake is a beautiful haven where she can hunt for treasures once swallowed up by a big flood. But when she’s caught scavenging by her biology teacher, a woman whose own past has been swept away, Chuntao is faced with an imponderable question: Which world was better - the ideal one she never knew or the destroyed one that now belongs to her?

Chuntao is still reeling from being tossed aside by her white boyfriend - and his enchantingly cozy family - when her coworker sets her up with a Burmese-American man named Gabe Dove. Out with a fellow Asian for the first time, Chuntao finds their commonality both attractive and repellant, intimate and embarrassing, familiar, and dangerously distancing. As their relationship deepens, Chuntao is both alert and blind to her own motives, as she starts treating Gabe Dove in ways even she doesn't understand.

The Vietnam draft is removing the staff of a rural Wisconsin bar one by one. Dishboys, bouncers, and a bartender named Roger are the latest to get induction notices, each showing a proud face while secretly terrified to face the medical examiners who will determine their fate. When help comes from an unexpected place, new problems arise. Shortlisted for Best American Short Stories 2015, Larson's intimate psychological portrait of fear takes the familiar and turns it into something utterly original.