Book
Songs on Endless Repeat
Songs on Endless Repeat is a posthumous collection of essays and fiction by Anthony Veasna So, published in 2023.[1][2] It brings together previously published essays, unpublished and unfinished fiction, and portions of So's unfinished novel Straight Thru Cambotown.[1]
About the book
The chapters alternate between fiction and nonfiction, and each is labeled as one or the other. Jonathan Dee, who wrote the foreword, said the structure was meant to create a dialogue between So's two modes of writing.[2] Chapters from Straight Thru Cambotown make up roughly half of the book.[2][3]
Straight Thru Cambotown follows three young Cambodian Americans after the death of their aunt.[4] It is set partly in "Cambotown," a Cambodian community in Los Angeles County. The aunt, Peou, is the "Counter" of the "Circle of Money" and acts as a loan officer for the community. She dies in a car accident, and her death shifts the balance of power in Cambotown.[2] The Circle of Money is an illegal Ponzi scheme, and the story takes up conflict between ethnic groups and generations and struggles with sexual identity.[3]
The essays cover reality television, the film Crazy Rich Asians, So's move from computer science to visual arts at Stanford, and his work fixing up his father's rental properties in Stockton, California.[4] The book opens with a short fictional piece, "We Are All the Same Here, Us Cambos," whose narrator acts as a tour guide to Cambodian immigrant culture and to the difficulty of honoring the genocide without being defined by it.[3] In "Duplex," So sets his father's work as a property manager beside his own time as an art student at Stanford.[3] The final essay, "Baby Yeah," is about the suicide of a friend and the value of art. Its title comes from a song by the band Pavement, a B-side from the 2002 reissue of Slanted and Enchanted. After his friend's death, So played the song over and over for an afternoon and a night.[3]
Publication and editions
Ecco Press published the book on December 5, 2023, in 240 pages.[1][3] It followed So's first book, Afterparties, and was his second posthumous release.[1][4] Jonathan Dee, So's former advisor in the Syracuse University MFA program, wrote the foreword. Straight Thru Cambotown began as So's graduate thesis at Syracuse.[1][4]
Several essays first appeared elsewhere. "Journey to a Land Free of White People" and "Baby Yeah" were published in n+1, "Manchester Street" in Ninth Letter, "Duplex" in The New Yorker, and a piece titled "The Millions" in The Millions.[1]
The audiobook, narrated by Keong Sim, runs more than seven hours.[4]
Reception
Kirkus Reviews and Publishers Weekly gave the book starred reviews. The book appeared on recommended lists from The Boston Globe, Alta Journal, Datebook and the Los Angeles Times.[1] The Los Angeles Times praised So's humor and his picture of the double bind of being Asian American.[1] The Chicago Review of Books found in it a mix of sensitivity, humor and anger, with So moving in new directions.[3]