The Đổi Mới literature can be traced to the appearances of novels by Ma Văn Kháng, Lê Lựu and Dương Thu Hương in 1985, 1986, 1987, respectively, with essays by the prominent critic Hoàng Ngọc Hiến and the writer-critic Nguyễn Minh Châu serving as catalysts.
In 1958, Nguyễn Hữu Đang, Thụy An and Trần Thiếu Bảo were slapped with 15-year sentences in kangaroo courts for their involvements in the Nhân Văn Giai Phẩm movement.
The wide circulation of Dương Thu Hương's first novel, Bên kia bờ ảo vọng [The Other Side Of Illusion] (1987), established her as a vanguard for Đổi Mới literature.
Later, with the appearance of Những thiên đường mù [Paradise Of The Blind] (1988) and Tiểu thuyềt vô đề [Novel without a Name] (1994) in foreign translations, plus her increasing outspokenness and seven-month imprisonment in 1991, Hương became Vietnam's most visible writer and dissident.
Its bias can be traced to the war, in which both North and South had demonized the other: A story in the same volume, "Hồi quang của mùa xuân" ["Reflections of Spring"], included in this anthology, showcases Hương's literary gifts sans soap box.
In place of what the historian Peter Zinoman termed "a canned cheeriness... central to the 'moral building' function of the revolutionary writers" are bleak portraits of a backward, rundown and corrupt society.
Dương Thu Hương lived in Russia, and the protagonist of her most successful novel, Những thiên đường mù [Paradise of the Blind], is a Vietnamese "guest worker" in the former Soviet Union.
Published in California, Vũ's fiction, populated mostly by Vietnamese characters, living inside or outside of Vietnam, alternates between a crisp, no-nonsense prose and a perversely-wrought archaism, extending the language in contrary directions.
Considering the paucity of translated books in Vietnam, even after the easing of state censorship, Thiệp's eclectic reading list, as revealed in his own essays and interviews, is an index to the mental life of a contemporary Hanoi intellectual: all the great Vietnamese poets, from the 15th century Nguyễn Trãi to Nguyễn Du; Chinese modern fiction pioneer Lu Tsun; first century BC Chinese historian Si Ma Quan (in Phan Ngọc's translation); The Three Kingdoms; Dostoyevski; Gogol; Gorky; Maupassant; Camus; Goethe; Tagore; Neruda; the Bible.
Like Europeans discovering Modernism through African sculptures, Thiệp arrived at something like Post-Modernism through the goblin stories of Lĩnh Nam Chích Quái and lores of the Black Thai minority.