Parabola Paperback – October 1, 2008

In utilizing various narrative modes, Parabola manages to capture the entire range of human experience--reminding us, on every page, that we are more than algorithms; but also, if anything, finite variables. With only a loose attention to time and space, Lily Hoang paints us a raw, emotive portrait of an impossibly marginalized existence, contrasted with bits of scientific/mathematical analysis and moments of stark, impossible beauty.This novel has everything: magnificent poetry, vivid surrealism, an elaborate form, and an intellectual edge backed by extensive erudition, softened by humor. Most importantly, it's completely fresh. I wouldn't hesitate to compare Lily Hoang to some of the best experimentalists around today--Eckhard Gerdes, Lance Olsen, James Chapman, etc--all of whom prove that the most innovative novels are still being written right now.

I think the blurbs say it all:Rarely does an author as fresh as Lily Hoang do so many things with such sophistication: a daring writer, an aesthetic high-wire walker who makes big issues her baton, balances the weight of literary and personal history-and all while wearing the future as her hat. In the midst of debates about where writing as an art form can go in this still nascent, post-everything new Millennium, Lily Hoang reveals one possibility: conceptually ambitious fiction woven from the lyrical language of longing. That is, Parabola is a novel of intersections--of Xs and Ys, of private and public paths. Coming to us from the crossroads of literature, Parabola also demonstrates how we don't have to choose between heart and head; anyone interested in traveling paths not-taken would do well to use this book as their compass.-Steve Tomasula===A work of proportion, grace, tenderness, ferocity. The easy intelligence and genuine audacity of Lily Hoang's Parabola makes it a wonderful and disarming reading experience.-Carole Maso===In PARABOLA, Lily Hoang has created a new form of constraint writing: fractal fiction, a fragmented geometric shape subdivided in parts, each of which is a reduced-size copy of the whole, all of which are based on the Pythagorean belief in numerical magic, in unity in multiplicity. The result is a smart, ingenious, difficult, absurd, surprising, unnerving, liberating, mathematically precise, temporally crazed, impishly interactive formal rupture and rapture, a beehive of narrative nodes. Read this, and you will never see the novel in the same way again. --Lance Olsen, author of 10:01 and ANXIOUS PLEASURES===Lily Hoang's Parabola deploys a calculus of composition that always already approaches the absolute of... Or I was going to say something like that, but this book exhausts the conceits of mathematics, physics, heavenly bodies, and the human heart. The story problems have all been proven; the figures figured. Parabola is a tour de form with force multiplied further. Elegant vision is the constant and ever-changing. And imaginary numbers are the least part of the imagination evident here, and everywhere, in this sublimely sublime book.-Michael Martone

What streams through the consciousness of a first-generation American daughter of Vietnamese immigrants? Her perspective, woven in autobiography and fantasy, expresses the deep conflict between life's realities weighed against expectations - both internal and external. The author superimposes her story over a mix of mathematics, music, and myth.PARABOLA challenged me to examine my own life story with an honest and critical eye, organizing my experiences in unfamiliar (and sometimes unsettling) sets and subsets. The book left me "almost satisfied" because self-discovery is a process that is never finished this side of senility or the grave.Lily Hoang addresses our myths of collective memory and aspiration in a style reminiscent of a good Kurt Vonnegut read, with a decidedly feminist flavor.The reader will chuckle and cry (sometimes simultaneously) while negotiating narratives of life's humorous, occasionally painful, ironies that we might never notice without a guide. In Parabola, Lily Hoang serves ably as that guide.

Parabola is experimental fiction at its finest. Combining all sorts of interesting devices, Hoang has shown how tightly-woven an experimental novel can be, to use all sorts of fresh perspectives and ways of bringing the reader through a stunning and intriguing web of motifs.