Linh Dinh


Linh Dinh is a Vietnamese-American poet, fiction writer, translator, and photographer.
He was a 1993 Pew Fellow. He writes a column for The Unz Review.

Biography

Dinh came to the US in 1975, lived in Philadelphia and in 2018 is moving back to Vietnam.
In 2005, he was a David Wong fellow at the University of East Anglia, in Norwich, England.
He spent 2002–2003 in Italy as a guest of the International Parliament of Writers and the town of Certaldo.
He was a visiting faculty member at University of Pennsylvania.
From 2015–2016, Dinh was the Picador Guest Professor for Literature at the University of Leipzig's Institute for American Studies in Leipzig, Germany.

Career

He is the author of two collections of stories, Fake House and Blood and Soap, and five books of poems: All Around What Empties Out, American Tatts, Borderless Bodies, Jam Alerts, and Some Kind of Cheese Orgy. His first novel, Love Like Hate, was published in October 2010 and won the Balcones Fiction Prize.
His work has been anthologized in Best American Poetry 2000, Best American Poetry 2004, The Best American Poetry 2007, and Great American Prose Poems from Poe to the Present. The Village Voice picked his Blood and Soap as one of the best books of 2004. Translated into Italian by Giovanni Giri, it is published in Italy as Elvis Phong è Morto.

Politics

Linh Dinh writes for The Unz Review.
He is a Holocaust denier, writing that “the elaborate Holocaust myth... propped up by a shoahload of bogus scholarship and tear jerking movies,” and has expressed suspicion that the 2018 shootings at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue were similarly fictitious, saying “The always reliable US media announced that 11 Jews were killed in Pittsburgh, although there’s not a single pixel of visual evidenceso the cat must have instantly covered all the corpses with dirt and lapped up every drop of blood.” He has suggested that Donald Trump is an agent of the deep state and that “to better serve Jews, Trump is willing to appear as their piñata.”
He believes that "Israel is a violent concept that is executed and maintained with terror, and by this I mean American-sponsored Jewish terror, though these world class terrorists are so relentless with their propaganda, they have made "terrorist" nearly synonymous with their enemy, the Muslim. There is hope for Palestinians, however, for as the USA implodes, Israel will also go up in smoke. Working in tandem, the US and Israel have collapsed several Muslim governments and generated millions of refugees. The same fate awaits Israel, though its dissolution should be permanent, for only then will peace come."
He has suggested that “in every field besides sports, entertainment and politics, blacks are failing spectacularly against all other races,” writing that “during segregation, blacks were self-sufficient, because they had to be. With integration, blacks can take their money to superior, non-black businesses, and that’s why you see almost no black businesses any more, not even in the blackest neighborhoods.” “Black hip hop the decay” of the American mind, he writes, saying “much of this has been accomplished under the stewardship of Jewish impresarios.”

Reviews

Publishers Weekly reviews Linh Dinh's :
He has translated many international poets into Vietnamese, and many Vietnamese poets and fiction writers into English, including Nguyen Quoc Chanh, Tran Vang Sao, Van Cam Hai, and Nguyen Huy Thiep.

Works

Poetry