her senior thesis and first solo performance work Mua He Do Lua/Red Fiery Summer. After graduation, she traveled the United States from 1995 to 1997 performing her play Red Fiery Summer in community spaces and formal theaters. In 1996, she was commissioned to write her second solo performance work, the bodies between us, which was subsequently produced by New WORLD Theater. In the same year, she published a prose piece entitled "The Gangster We Are All Looking For" in the Massachusetts Review. It was rerun in Harper's Magazine later that year, and caught the attention of literary agent Nicole Aragi, who urged Lê to expand the work into a novel. The unfinished book was picked up in 1999 by publisher Alfred A. Knopf. In 1998, while working on her book, Lê returned to Vietnam for the first time in 20 years, with her mother. Her trip made her appreciate how much her parents had suffered when they settled in the United States. "It was profoundly sad for me," she says. "The most powerful thing was this [extended] family. I must have been related to 200 people there. I realized how isolated my parents must have felt, the extent of what they had lost and had never been able to regain." Her mother returned to Vietnam permanently in 2001 after she was diagnosed with cancer. She is buried in her home village of Phan Thiết. Le's father moved back to Vietnam in 2003. Le was cited by The New York Times as one of its "Writers On The Verge" shortly before her novel, The Gangster We Are All Looking For, was published by Knopf (2003), to glowing reviews. Her work has appeared in the Massachusetts Review, Harper's Magazine, and the anthology The Very Inside, and among her awards are Fellowships from the Radcliffe and Guggenheim foundations. Her solo performance work includes Red Fiery Summer and The Bodies Between Us, which have been performed throughout the United States at venues including the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Vineyard Theater, as well as in Europe. While the former piece reflects many stories later included in The Gangster ..., Lê is currently basing her next novel on the latter. I go about things in an oblique way. It's like a sidelong glance. This doesn't mean I don't like the sharp stab of directness — only that what I like more are all