Anthony Veasna So Books in Order

Anthony Veasna So was born in Stockton, California, on February 20, 1992, and grew up in a Cambodian American family shaped by refugee history, hard work, and a lot of talk. His parents had survived the Khmer Rouge genocide before coming to the United States, and Stockton, home to one of the country's largest Cambodian communities, stayed at the center of his imagination.

As a child, So spent long stretches at his father's car repair shop. He cleaned, helped around the front office, read library books, and played computer solitaire while adults came and went. The family business, its daily routines, and the jokes shared around difficult memories all gave him material he would return to in his work.

He learned early that humor could sit beside pain.

So was a first-generation college student and graduated from Stanford University in 2014 with degrees in English literature and art practice. He drew cartoons, worked on graphic novels, edited the campus humor magazine, and tried stand-up comedy in Los Angeles and New York. Those interests helped shape fiction that pays close attention to dialogue, awkward social moments, pop culture, and the odd little performances people make of themselves.

After college, he taught writing and literature, including work with students preparing for college. He then entered Syracuse University's MFA program in fiction as a Paul & Daisy Soros Fellow. There he built the stories that would make up his first book while also working on a novel set among Cambodian American cousins.

His writing began appearing in magazines including The New Yorker, n+1, Granta, and ZYZZYVA. One early story, “Superking Son Scores Again,” turns badminton, a grocery store, family history, and teenage ambition into an especially good introduction to his interests. The work is funny, but the jokes never erase the pressure his characters carry.

Afterparties, published in 2021 after So's death, gathers stories about Cambodian Americans in Northern California. Its people run shops and garages, teach school, chase old sporting glory, fall in and out of love, argue with relatives, and look for room to be themselves. Readers often come to the book for its lively humor and stay for the care it gives to friendships, queer lives, family ties, and inherited trauma.

His second book, Songs on Endless Repeat, arrived in 2023. It collects essays, shorter pieces, and unfinished fiction, including parts of the novel he had been developing. The book lets readers see more of his range: an artist thinking about class and California, a child of refugees thinking through memory, and a writer interested in what people owe their families, communities, and younger selves.

So did not separate Cambodian American life from the rest of American life. He wrote about it in the fullness of its bad jokes, tenderness, resentment, work, parties, and hope.

He completed his MFA in 2020 and died in San Francisco on December 8 of that year, at age 28. His published work is brief, yet it offers a generous, clear-eyed picture of the people and places he knew, and of the futures they were trying to make.