"An Exciting Period for Vietnamese Prose"

This is an English translation of an article by Nguyen Ngoc, a well-known Vietnamese writer and critic, which was originally published in Vietnamese in 2004. The author revised and updated his original article before publishing it in English. Nguyen Ngoc describes current trends in Vietnamese prose. He stresses the period immediately preceding and following Renovation, Vietnam's move to a market economy that occurred in the mid and late 1980s, a movement which was accompanied by more freedom for writers, but he comments also on more recent works.