About the Author

Vu Trong Phung is arguably the greatest Vietnamese writer of the twentieth century. Compared to Balzac by some, he was a prolific and controversial satirist unafraid to challenge the prevailing mores of his age. Although he died before his twenty-seventh birthday, Vu Trong Phung amassed a body of work that includes eight novels, seven plays, and five book-length works of nonfiction. Dumb Luck is generally acknowledged as his defining masterpiece.

Peter Zinoman is Associate Professor of Southeast Asian History at the University of California, Berkeley. A writer, editor, and translator in addition to being a scholar, his research interests include the cultural, social, and political history of Vietnam, as well as the history of twentieth-century Vietnamese literature. He is also the author of The Colonial Bastille: A History of Imprisonment in Vietnam, 1862-1940.

Nguyen Nguyet Cam is Vietnamese Language Instructor at the University of California, Berkeley. A gifted linguist, she has published numerous translations of works from English into Vietnamese, including two of E. B. White’s classic children’s novels, Charlotte’s Web and The Trumpet of the Swan. She has also translated several pieces of Vietnamese fiction into English.