Love is not the answer. It is the question that keeps us alive.
In Love, Anyways, Vietnamese-Canadian author Thanh Dinh gathers a constellation of stories about the endurance of tenderness in an unkind world. Each piece examines the quiet corners of human existence—loneliness, guilt, memory, faith, and the fragile ways people try to love despite the certainty of loss.
A man tends to an apple tree after a war that has already taken everything from him. Two women argue about the meaning of goodness while bombs fall outside their window. A writer searches for the right words to confess her sins to a past she can never reclaim. A son returns home to bury the mother who never learned how to say she loved him. Across landscapes of ruin and redemption, Dinh’s characters live not to be saved—but to feel.
Her prose is poetic yet precise, tender yet unflinching, echoing the existential lyricism of Ocean Vuong, Yiyun Li, and Hanya Yanagihara. Through sentences that hum with quiet rebellion, Dinh transforms suffering into a kind of grace—a beauty born not of comfort, but of endurance.
The title—Because the Apple Trees Blossom—serves as both confession and commandment: a reminder that life continues even when it shouldn’t. The apple trees bloom not because they are spared from evil, but because blooming is their only language of survival.
For readers of literary short fiction, Asian diaspora stories, and LGBTQ+ philosophical fiction, this collection will resonate long after the last page. Each story stands as an elegy and a rebellion, whispering the same truth:
Love, even when it’s hopeless.
Love, even when it hurts.
Love, anyways.
