The late Anthony Veasna So

When I met Anthony at St anford in 2014, he declared that he would become a famous fiction writer, even though he had never written fiction before, at least not in a serious way. He was the coeditor in chief of Stanford’s humor magazine, the Chaparral, as well as an up-and-coming stand-up comedian, performing in Los Angeles and New York City during the summer of 2013. Setting out to write the very first stories of what would become the collection Afterparties, Anthony simply channeled the dark humor that he had developed onstage into literary fiction. He imagined how his readers would have reacted if each story were performed as a free-wielding standup set, each paragraph an extended bit.

As a comedian A nthony had leveraged elaborate stories about his upbringing in Stockton, California, and about his sexual escapades to shed a