 Western and overseas Vietnamese critics, in assessing his varied output, have tripped over each other delineating his affinities with experimental writers such as Borges, Eco and Rushdie, most of whom he has never heard of.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.The stories in "Night, Again" testify to the resilience of literature in a country which does not reward and often punishes its best writers, where the most famous author is banned and the most accomplished is an erudite maitre d'.