“Tough stories told brilliantly, beautifully.” The Gods of Angkor Wat exposes the complexity of human emotions with all their scars and bruises. This collection of short stories takes us on a tour of battlefields, from a schoolyard playground to the family kitchen, from a Mexican bullring to peer pressure in the killing fields of Vietnam. Each tale bears witness to life as it is—and not as we wish it were—revealing compassion, violence, love and betrayal through an unflinching look at the human condition. Hard-bitten yet redemptive, these stories offer tightly woven prose in the literary fiction milieu.
See what others are saying about The Gods of Angkor Wat:
Beautiful, real “tough-knuckled fiction” by veteran @kenrodgers. The Gods of Angkor Wat. #mustread #PTSD #nam
—Rebecca Lawton, author of Reading Water: Lessons from the River and Junction, Utah
The book I’ve read this year that keeps my head spinning, my heart aching, and my love for story burning is THE GODS OF ANGKOR WAT by Ken Rodgers. This is a collection of short stories that covers a span of time in the middle to late part of the last century, telling the stories of American lives deeply affected by sorrow, loss, love, war, pain, desire, and all the other human emotions that break and fill us. These are tough stories told brilliantly, beautifully. Rodgers is a word master, and these characters in these moments he creates for us are real, bruised, and longing for the world to be a better place than it is.
—Patricia Ann McNair, author of Temple of Air
On THE GODS OF ANGKOR WAT from Jonah Raskin, author of many books, including AMERICAN SCREAM and FOR THE HELL OF IT, THE LIFE AND TIMES OF ABBIE HOFFMAN.
I have in hand a copy of Ken Rodgers’s new collection of short stories entitled “The Gods of Angkor Wat,” and, while it’s hard to improve on the comments by author Jean Hegland at the front of the book — she says that “his writing is always unflinchingly honest” — I might add that wherever you open the book and begin to read, Ken’s language pulls you in and makes you feel like you’re there at Angkor Wat and at all the other landscapes that inform his stories. They may not be “summer reading” as the term is usually used but his stories fit for reading this summer or any other time.
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Order the paperback edition here.
The KINDLE edition can be ordered here.