Background
Wayne Karlin was born on June 13, 1945 in Los Angeles, California, United States. He is a son of Louis and Rhoda Karlin.
550 North Street White Plains, New York 10605, United States
Wayne Karlin attended White Plains High School.
Goddard College, Plainfield, Vermont, United States
In 1976 Wayne Karlin obtained a Master of Arts degree from Goddard College.
(Emmett Wheeler, a Vietnam veteran teaching English to Vie...)
Emmett Wheeler, a Vietnam veteran teaching English to Vietnamese refugees in Maryland, searches for his boyhood friend Dennis Slagel and ends up falling in love with Xuan, Dennis's Vietnamese lover.
https://www.amazon.com/Lost-Armies-Wayne-Karlin/dp/0805007156/?tag=2022091-20
1988
(Ezra Brenner, a Jew, and Maryam Halim, a Palestinian, chi...)
Ezra Brenner, a Jew, and Maryam Halim, a Palestinian, childhood chums, reunite during a filming on the deserts of Israel, but their love affair is complicated by the political antagonism of their nationalities.
https://www.amazon.com/Extras-Wayne-Karlin/dp/0805010769/?tag=2022091-20
1989
(The legacy of the American experience in Vietnam is still...)
The legacy of the American experience in Vietnam is still unfolding, a matrix of barbed and irreconcilable issues and attitudes that we will carry, in spite of ourselves, into the next century. We are all haunted, no matter where we stood or what we did during those years, by the unappeasable ghosts of American conscience and commitment gone horribly wrong, and by the ambiguous fate of the thousands of Americans left behind - still missing in action, still unaccounted for - the ghostly ranks of the MIAs. In Us, his fourth novel, Wayne Karlin explores our national obsession with our MIAs in a drama that combines aspects of realistic adventure narrative with a more emblematic quest - sometimes hallucinatory, sometimes hilarious - for the deeper psychological significance these missing men and women hold in the American psyche. Loman, Karlin's protagonist, is a Vietnam vet with a checkered career. He has chosen to remain in Southeast Asia, and owns a bar in Bangkok, mecca for sex tours and cheap drugs, and port of entry for all those who come in search of the "missing." When a visiting congressman engages him to help establish contact with a group of MIAs the congressman alleges is operating as an independent force with one of the Golden Triangle opium armies, Loman accepts the job, not realizing at first that his search will quickly bring him up against a mind and force with which he is utterly unfamiliar. History, myth, and reality blur as Karlin then enters a world that turns our expectations upside down, a world of mountain spirits, montebanks, and strange rebels. By book's end, Loman has learned again some of the harshest lessons of the war, but also has achieved a measure of peace that had previously escaped him. Tim O'Brien has written that Wayne Karlin is "one of the most gifted writers to emerge from the Vietnam War." In Us, his best book to date, Karlin probes as deeply into the dark heart of the war and its aftermath as any writer of his generation.
https://www.amazon.com/Us-Wayne-Karlin/dp/0805010831/?tag=2022091-20
1993
(These stories represent the "second wave" of fiction - wo...)
These stories represent the "second wave" of fiction - works about the aftermath of the Vietnam conflict as it moved into both countries, touching and forever changing not only the veterans, but also their families and their societies.
https://www.amazon.com/Other-Side-Heaven-Post-War-Vietnamese/dp/1880684314/?tag=2022091-20
1995
("In the summer of 1993 I began a self-imposed journey int...)
"In the summer of 1993 I began a self-imposed journey into the blurred space between memory, story, and reality when I rented a car from Warsaw Avis and drove to the village in Poland in which my mother had lived before immigrating to the United States." So begins Wayne Karlin's Rumors and Stones, the haunting narrative of a writer's journey into his family's past in the small Polish town of Kolno whose 2,000 Jewish inhabitants were machinegunned in ditches in 1941. Karlin explores the tension in the role of the storyteller as a witness and keeper but also as shaper; it is a journey in space that becomes a journey into the past and into the truth that can only be found in the imagination; it is a journey into Karlin's own origins as a veteran of the Vietnam war and as a writer compelled in his work to always come back to that conflict and the net of connections from it he feels like a "cicatrix just under the skin of the brain."
https://www.amazon.com/Rumors-Stones-Journey-Wayne-Karlin/dp/188068442X/?tag=2022091-20
1996
(This collection of 14 stories - each a harrowing sketch o...)
This collection of 14 stories - each a harrowing sketch of the Vietnam War and its aftermath - offers American readers a glimpse offamiliar territory, but from an unfamiliar perspective. Often writing from a young woman's point of view, Le Minh Khue, a war veteran who served in the Youth Volunteers Brigade, uses simple, understated prose to describe numbing horrors.
https://www.amazon.com/Stars-Earth-River-Stories-Vietnam/dp/1880684470/?tag=2022091-20
1997
(Central to Wayne Karlin's novel Prisoners is the story of...)
Central to Wayne Karlin's novel Prisoners is the story of Kiet, a runaway teenage orphan from Vietnam who is seeking her Black father and whose flight impinges upon the lives of several other characters, many of them Vietnam War veterans. The drama of the interlinking stories illuminates the "seepage of history" and examines the "crimes of war and family and skin" in the Tidewater region in Maryland. Karlin unpeels their histories like an onion, layer after layer, until the violent climax, and a denouement that offers understanding, hope, and reconciliation.
https://www.amazon.com/Prisoners-Wayne-Karlin/dp/188068456X/?tag=2022091-20
1998
(Behind the Red Mist gives us for the first time in Englis...)
Behind the Red Mist gives us for the first time in English a wide range of stories from the most important writer of the post-war generation in Vietnam. The characters range from a party official who turns into a goat while watching porno movies, to an Indian who carries his mother's bones in his knapsack, to a war widow trying desperately to piece together her life through the fragments of debris she collects from her back yard.
https://www.amazon.com/Behind-Red-Mist-Fiction-Vietnam/dp/1880684543/?tag=2022091-20
1998
(The Wished For Country is set during the founding period ...)
The Wished For Country is set during the founding period of the Maryland colony, during the mid-17th century. The novel focuses on the entwined stories of James Hallam, a carpenter and indentured servant; Ezekiel, an African slave brought to Maryland from Barbados; and Tawzin, a Piscataway Indian, kidnapped to England when a child, and now back in America. While Hallam goes on to become a soldier and a player in the politics of the Maryland colony, Ezekiel and Tawzin become the center of an outcast group of blacks, whites, and Indians, who find themselves striving to reinvent themselves and their world. The stories of these three men, the women who love them, and the community they form, bring to vivid life the experiences of those who came to America pulled by a dream of what could be shaped from an emptiness that embodied promise, of those who were unwillingly brought to be the instruments of that dream, and of those who saw the shape of their world forever changed by the coming of the Europeans.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B078J49H9Z/?tag=2022091-20
2002
(Wayne Karlin's memoir War Movies recounts his return to V...)
Wayne Karlin's memoir War Movies recounts his return to Vietnam as scriptwriter and actor in the award-winning Vietnamese film Song of the Stork. On his journey, Karlin lives in two worlds-the world of postwar Vietnam and the world of film. Past and present, illusion and reality, humor and sorrow blend as he works on the film and converses with his former enemies. Particularly powerful are the contrasts between the young and old generations of Vietnamese and the meditative quality of the narrative as Karlin explores the ironies involved in bridging the gap between past and present.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/193189616X/?tag=2022091-20
2005
(Kiet and her adoptive father, Alex Hallam - a Vietnam vet...)
Kiet and her adoptive father, Alex Hallam - a Vietnam veteran working out his own tormented past through his passion for sculpting - travel to Vietnam. There, at Marble Mountain, a formation near Danang that is famous for its stone carvers and cave shrines, both will find the unresolved secrets of the past that connected them to each other even before Kiet was born.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1931896437/?tag=2022091-20
2008
(On March 19, 1969, First Lieutenant Homer R. Steedly, Jr....)
On March 19, 1969, First Lieutenant Homer R. Steedly, Jr., shot and killed a North Vietnamese soldier, Dam, when they met on a jungle trail. Steedly took a diary - filled with beautiful line drawings - from the body of the dead soldier, which he subsequently sent to his mother for safekeeping. Thirty-five years later, Steedly rediscovers the forgotten dairy and begins to confront his suppressed memories of the war that defined his life, deciding to return to Viet Nam and meet the family of the man he killed to seek their forgiveness.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002PXFXXO/?tag=2022091-20
2009
Wayne Karlin was born on June 13, 1945 in Los Angeles, California, United States. He is a son of Louis and Rhoda Karlin.
Wayne Karlin attended White Plains High School. In 1972 he received a Bachelor of Arts degree from American College, Jerusalem. In 1976 he obtained a Master of Arts degree from Goddard College.
Wayne Karlin was a helicopter gunner during the Vietnam War. In 1972 Karlin was a reporter for the Reporter Dispatch at Gannett Newspapers. From 1972 to 1973 he was a president and coeditor of First Casualty Press. From 1973 to 1975 he was an instructor in creative writing and director of student activities at American College, Jerusalem, Israel. From 1973 to 1975 Karlin was a freelance writer in Israel.
From 1982 to 1984 he was an instructor in English at Montgomery College. In 1984 he was appointed as a professor of language and literature at the College of Southern Maryland. He retired as a professor emeritus from that institution, where he taught for over thirty years. From 1989 to 1993 Wayne Karlin was a visiting writer and faculty at the Joiner Center for the Study of War and Social Consequences at the University of Massachusetts. In 1994 Wayne was a fiction director of Literary Festival at St. Mary's College.
From 1995 to 2010, as American editor for Curbstone's Voices from Vietnam series, he edited and adapted translations of books by writers from Vietnam, including (with Le Minh Khue and Truong Vu), The Other Side of Heaven: Postwar Fiction by Vietnamese and American Writers, which was listed as a Critics' Choice for 1995-1996, and (with Ho Anh Thai) Love After War: Contemporary Fiction from Vietnam, an anthology chosen by The San Francisco Chronicle as one of the 100 best books of 2003.
("In the summer of 1993 I began a self-imposed journey int...)
1996(Central to Wayne Karlin's novel Prisoners is the story of...)
1998(These stories represent the "second wave" of fiction - wo...)
1995(Ezra Brenner, a Jew, and Maryam Halim, a Palestinian, chi...)
1989(Emmett Wheeler, a Vietnam veteran teaching English to Vie...)
1988(The legacy of the American experience in Vietnam is still...)
1993(This collection of 14 stories - each a harrowing sketch o...)
1997(Behind the Red Mist gives us for the first time in Englis...)
1998(Kiet and her adoptive father, Alex Hallam - a Vietnam vet...)
2008(Wayne Karlin's memoir War Movies recounts his return to V...)
2005(The Wished For Country is set during the founding period ...)
2002(This is a collection of short stories on Vietnam.)
1973(On March 19, 1969, First Lieutenant Homer R. Steedly, Jr....)
2009On October 27, 1977 Wayne Karlin married Ohnmar Thein, a retired counselor for adolescent youth. They have a son, Adam.