Maxima Library

This story is written to understand and appreciate one family’s journey from Vietnam to America and their hope for a new beginning.

Invisible Women is really two books entwined in one, a dialogue between psychoanalysts weaving through descriptions of luminous women. Told in a specific collective “we,” Hoang’s own voice becomes a compelling part of what’s being told. Just like Italo Calvino wrote of vast buildings constructed of words alone in Invisible Cities, Invisible Womenpresents complicated stories of feminine archetypes in the form of psychoanalytic case studies.

Michael Cunningham, Francine Prose, Aimee Bender, Kelly Link, Jim Shepard, and more than thirty other extraordinary writers celebrate fairy tales in this thrilling new volume. Inspire by everything from Hans Christian Andersen's "The Snow Queen" and "The Little Match Girl" to Charles Perrault's "Bluebeard" and "Cinderella" to the Brothers Grimm's "Hansel and Gretel" and "Rumpelstiltskin" to fairy tales by Goethe and Calvino and from China, Japan, Vietnam, Russia, Norway, and Mexico, here are stories that soar into boundless realms, filled with mischief and mystery and magic, and renewed by the lifeblood of invention. Although rooted in hundreds of years of tradition, they chart the imaginative frontiers of the twenty-first century as powerfully as they evoke our earliest encounters with literature.

"Hoang invited over twenty adventurous writers to submit unfinished stories that she then completed. Story fragments ranged from a few sentences to a few pages, and manifested in wildly different styles."