Afterparties
Afterparties is the debut, and only, collection from Anthony Veasna So, who died in 2020. Its nine stories follow Khmer American characters across the Central Valley and Bay Area of California, often in donut shops, family parties, classrooms, and weddings. They are children and grandchildren of refugees whose parents survived the Khmer Rouge regime, and they live with that inheritance while also wrestling with the ordinary concerns of work, family, sex, and identity. So writes with comic timing and a real ear for how people actually talk, while never softening the historical weight underneath. Published in 2021, the collection was widely celebrated as a major debut and is now read both as a powerful book in itself and as the work of a young writer cut short.
What you might want to know about Afterparties
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Linked stories about Cambodian American families in California living in the long shadow of the Khmer Rouge genocide.
Yes. They share a community of Cambodian American families in California and a few characters cross between them.
It deals with serious history but the prose is often very funny, in the tradition of writers like Lorrie Moore or Junot Diaz.
Afterparties was written by Anthony Veasna So, published in 2021 by HarperCollins Publishers.
Afterparties is 256 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Afterparties takes most readers 4 to 6 hours to finish.
Afterparties is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.