* TRỊNH CÔNG SƠN & BOB DYLAN
by John C. Schafer

  Nicknamed "Vietnam’s Bob Dylan" by Joan Baez, Trịnh Công Sơn (1939 – 2001) was a famous musician, songwriter, painter and poet. He, along with Phạm Duy and Văn Cao, is an important figure in modern Vietnamese music. He wrote more than 600 songs; if many of them are love songs, others are anti-war songs written during and about the Vietnam War. Some of these were censored by the southern Republic of Vietnam and later by the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.

  Initially a research essay by John Schafer, professor of comparative literature at Humboldt University, California, this is the English augmented version of his Vietnamese books published in 2012 and 2019 on the same subject.

   "In this accessible deep-dive into the careers of Trịnh Công Sơn and Bob Dylan, Schafer retells countless colorful stories from the two artists’ lives drawn from a wide range of Vietnamese and English-language sources.
   TRỊNH CÔNG SƠN & BOB DYLAN evaluates the relationship between two of the 20th century’s most beloved and essential songwriters, in the process illuminating Vietnamese and American views on spirituality, romance, philosophy, identity, and conflict."

- ESSAYS ON WAR, LOVE, SONGWRITING, AND RELIGION, The Press At Cal Poly Humboldt 2023. The .pdf is available here. Thank you to Knut Högvall and Jürgen Wasser for the information.

softcover, 659 pages. ISBN 978-1947112971.

hardcover, 660 pages. ISBN 978-1962081061