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THE RENT COLLECTOR

Adapted for young readers from the best-selling novel.

by Camron Wright ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 5, 2022

A story of survival that is most effective when it comes to showing the power of reading.

Inspired by a true story, this young readers’ edition of a 2012 title for adults focuses on a family living in a large garbage dump on the outskirts of Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

Sang Ly, the woman at the heart of the story, says, “The clock is broken, so its time never changes.” This is a metaphor for her life in Stung Meanchey, where she sorts through the trash for recyclables and endures daily struggles. Sang Ly’s life turns a corner when she offers Sopeap Sin, “a bitter, angry woman” who collects rent from the dump’s residents for local landlords, a discarded children’s book in lieu of payment. This marks the beginning of a genuine relationship between the two, a journey through language and literature. As Sang Ly haltingly learns to read from Sopeap, she becomes determined to give her ailing son an education and starts to interpret the world through the written word. In this way, she begins to take control; for his part, her husband, Ki Lim, carries a knife to defend their family from gangs. Most powerful here is the matryoshka-doll–like format of stories within stories that highlight the power of literacy. Unfortunately, in explaining the book’s context, the author’s note prefacing the story asks readers, “What if you lived in a garbage dump?” and “Worse, what if you couldn’t read?” which has the effect of othering the protagonists.

Pub Date: April 5, 2022

ISBN: 978-1-62972-985-5

Page Count: 240

Publisher: Shadow Mountain

Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2022

CHILDREN'S SOCIAL THEMES

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by Louis Sachar ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 1998

Good Guys and Bad get just deserts in the end, and Stanley gets plenty of opportunities to display pluck and valor in this...

Sentenced to a brutal juvenile detention camp for a crime he didn't commit, a wimpy teenager turns four generations of bad family luck around in this sunburnt tale of courage, obsession, and buried treasure from Sachar ( Wayside School Gets a Little Stranger , 1995, etc.).

Driven mad by the murder of her black beau, a schoolteacher turns on the once-friendly, verdant town of Green Lake, Texas, becomes feared bandit Kissin' Kate Barlow, and dies, laughing, without revealing where she buried her stash. A century of rainless years later, lake and town are memories—but, with the involuntary help of gangs of juvenile offenders, the last descendant of the last residents is still digging. Enter Stanley Yelnats IV, great-grandson of one of Kissin' Kate's victims and the latest to fall to the family curse of being in the wrong place at the wrong time; under the direction of The Warden, a woman with rattlesnake venom polish on her long nails, Stanley and each of his fellow inmates dig a hole a day in the rock-hard lake bed. Weeks of punishing labor later, Stanley digs up a clue, but is canny enough to conceal the information of which hole it came from. Through flashbacks, Sachar weaves a complex net of hidden relationships and well-timed revelations as he puts his slightly larger-than-life characters under a sun so punishing that readers will be reaching for water bottles.

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998

ISBN: 978-0-374-33265-5

Page Count: 233

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2000

CHILDREN'S SOCIAL THEMES | CHILDREN'S MYSTERY & THRILLER

More by Louis Sachar

BOOK REVIEW

by Louis Sachar ; illustrated by Tim Heitz

by Louis Sachar

THE SCHOOL FOR GOOD AND EVIL

From the school for good and evil series , vol. 1.

by Soman Chainani ; illustrated by Iacopo Bruno ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 14, 2013

Rich and strange (and kitted out with an eye-catching cover), but stronger in the set pieces than the internal logic.

Chainani works an elaborate sea change akin to Gregory Maguire’s Wicked (1995), though he leaves the waters muddied.

Every four years, two children, one regarded as particularly nice and the other particularly nasty, are snatched from the village of Gavaldon by the shadowy School Master to attend the divided titular school. Those who survive to graduate become major or minor characters in fairy tales. When it happens to sweet, Disney princess–like Sophie and  her friend Agatha, plain of features, sour of disposition and low of self-esteem, they are both horrified to discover that they’ve been dropped not where they expect but at Evil and at Good respectively. Gradually—too gradually, as the author strings out hundreds of pages of Hogwarts-style pranks, classroom mishaps and competitions both academic and romantic—it becomes clear that the placement wasn’t a mistake at all. Growing into their true natures amid revelations and marked physical changes, the two spark escalating rivalry between the wings of the school. This leads up to a vicious climactic fight that sees Good and Evil repeatedly switching sides. At this point, readers are likely to feel suddenly left behind, as, thanks to summary deus ex machina resolutions, everything turns out swell(ish).

Pub Date: May 14, 2013

ISBN: 978-0-06-210489-2

Page Count: 496

Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2013

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2013

CHILDREN'S SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY | CHILDREN'S SOCIAL THEMES

More In The Series

by Soman Chainani ; illustrated by Iacopo Bruno

More by Soman Chainani

by Soman Chainani ; illustrated by RaidesArt

by Soman Chainani ; illustrated by Julia Iredale

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Bucket List Book Reviews

Miz Parker’s Quest to Read Every Book on the List "1,001 Books to Read Before You Die."

The Rent Collector

Author: Camron Wright Winner: 2012 Book of the Year Gold Winner (Foreword Magazine), 2012 Best Novel of the Year (Whitney Awards), Honorable Mention (Great Southwest Book Festival), 2013 One Read Selection (California Chapter of Delta Kappa Gamma Society of Outstanding Women Educators) Original Publication: 2012 Genre: Fiction

The Rent Collector takes place in Cambodia in the aftermath of the Pol Pot / Khmer Rouge Communist regime. Sang Ly and her husband, Ki Lim, are “pickers”; that is, they live in a shantytown in Stung Meanchey, the garbage dump outside Phnom Penh, and make their living picking through the trash for recyclables. Owing to their poor living conditions, their infant son, Nisay, is chronically ill. Their existence is punctuated once per month by the appearance of the rent collector, Sopeap Sin. Sopeap Sin is an elderly, unpleasant and often drunk woman who squeezes every last dime from the residents of Stung Meanchey. Like all tenants, they pay in order to avoid being thrown into the street, which actually seems marginally better to me than living in a tarpaper shack atop a burning pile of garbage.

One day, Ki Lim is robbed by a roving gang and when Sopeap Sin arrives to collect the rent, Sang Ly is unable to pay. Ki Lim did manage to bring home a book, thinking that the illustrations would at least amuse Nisay. The Khmer Rouge executed much of the educated populace in favor of easily controlled poor, so nobody they know is able to read. Sopeap Sin threatens the family, but when she glimpses Nisay’s book, she falls to her knees, greedily thumbing through it, and Sang Ly begins to suspect that Sopeap Sin can secretly read. The two strike up a bargain, and Sopeap Sin agrees to teach Sang Ly. Sang Ly quickly discovers that Sopeap Sin not only can read, but is highly educated and knows all about literature. They begin reading and discussing stories.

Meanwhile, Sang Ly has dreamed that the Healer in her home province holds the key to Nisay’s health, and the family begins to make plans to travel there. When they return, Sopeap Sin has disappeared and they discover that she is gravely ill. Sang Ly and her family immediately set about finding her and solving the mystery of who she really is before her time runs out.

Fun Fact: The story is fiction, but Stung Meanchey, Sang Ly and her family, and many of the other characters in the story are real. The Rent Collector was based on a documentary called River of Victory . The author wove a fictional story about the actual people, imagining what might happen if a family under those circumstances were given the gift of literacy. Stung Meanchey closed in 2009 and an alternate dump was opened, upon which no homes are allowed. Most of the pickers who lived there are now on the streets of Phnom Penh.

Bother if: I read this novel in a sitting, and may have teared up a few times. It’s a truly wonderful story; some say about the triumph and perseverance of the human spirit. It is, but I didn’t see it that way. I saw it as an homage to the written word, and the story of a woman who begins to realize that stories – her stories, her neighbor’s stories, all written stories – are the key to her freedom at least spiritually, if not physically. It is her literacy which makes every opportunity possible. It is her literacy which opens up her entire worldview. I particularly enjoyed a section where Sang Ly laments that either she doesn’t understand Moby Dick, or Herman Melville was a terrible writer, because ‘good’ and ‘evil’ to her are fairly concrete concepts. After an incident which is anything but black and white, Sang Ly reflects on Moby Dick, realizing that Herman Melville understood the human experience perfectly after all – no hero is all good, and no villain is all evil.

Don’t bother if: There isn’t anything inordinately offensive about this book. I thought it was a very engaging story, but the subject matter is necessarily grim. I’m not sure I’ve read a story about a more destitute group of people. Destitute, however, does not equal hopeless. That said, “feel good” stories aren’t everybody’s cup of tea, either. As for me, I didn’t think I’d be at all interested in the depressing subject matter, and would not have ever chosen to read this without the catalyst of a book club meeting to spur me on, but I am pleased to have read it. I am, however, a sucker for homages to literature.

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Reading Challenges

The rent collector by camron wright.

Posted January 3, 2024 by jrsbookr in Historical fiction / 0 Comments

Survival for Ki Lim and Sang Ly is a daily battle at Stung Meanchey, the largest municipal waste dump in all of Cambodia. They make their living scavenging recyclables from the trash. Life would be hard enough without the worry for their chronically ill child, Nisay, and the added expense of medicines that are not really working. Just when things seem most bleak, Sang Ly learns a secret about the hated, ill-tempered woman, the "the rent collector"-she can read Reluctantly she agrees to teach Sang Ly and does so with the same harshness she applied to her collection duties until they both learn how literacy has the power to instill hope and transcend circumstance. Based on a true story, set in the abject poverty of Cambodia against the backdrop of political oppression and the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge.

Why I Read This Book:

I joined a new to be me challenge called In Case You Missed It and it goal to read one of the best books out of each year from 2012-2023 from a list generated by the owners of the challenge.  If  you like more infomation you can get that at Book Girls Guide.

Also this book was one of my netgalley backlist books so it worked for both challenges.

The Rent Collector is one of those novels you pick up at just the right time, and it cleanses your soul to the core of who you are.   As my first read for 2024, it did just that, as I read about a family who lives in the dump in Cambodia and a mother’s desperate attempt to learn to read to hopefully open up more doors for herself and her young son.   Read if you are tired of hopelessness, read if you believe in redemption even in the hardest of hearts, and read if you love reading.   This book will give you all the feels and make you even more grateful for the life you have, the life you will have, and the life you share with those you interact with.  

About Cameron Wright

Camron Wright was born and raised in Salt Lake City, Utah. He has a master’s degree in Writing and Public Relations from Westminster College. He has owned several successful retail stores in addition to working with his wife in the fashion industry, designing for the McCall Pattern Company in New York.

Camron says he began writing to get out of attending MBA school, and it proved the better decision. His first book, Letters for Emily, was a Readers Choice Award winner, as well as a selection of the Doubleday Book Club and the Literary Guild. Letters for Emily has been published in North America, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Korea, the Netherlands, and China.

The Rent Collector, his second book, won Best Novel of the Year from the Whitney Awards and was a nominee for the prestigious International DUBLIN Literary Award.

The Orphan Keeper won Book of the Year, Gold accolades in Multicultural Fiction from Foreword Reviews. Other books include The Other Side of the Bridge, Christmas by Accident, and his latest book, In Times of Rain and War will release in April 2021.

Camron lives with his wife, Alicyn, just south of Salt Lake City at the base of the Wasatch Mountains. He is the proud father of four children, all girls but three.

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• ICYMI Challenge
• Netgalley Backlist

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Book reviews and some (mostly funny) true stories of my life.

Book Review: The Rent Collector by Camron Wright

June 25, 2018 By Jessica Filed Under: Book Review 1 Comment

The Rent Collector

Survival for Ki Lim and Sang Ly is a daily battle at Stung Meanchey, the largest municipal waste dump in all of Cambodia. They make their living scavenging recyclables from the trash. Life would be hard enough without the worry for their chronically ill child, Nisay, and the added expense of medicines that are not working. Just when things seem worst, Sang Ly learns a secret about the bad-tempered rent collector who comes demanding money--a secret that sets in motion a tide that will change the life of everyone it sweeps past. The Rent Collector is a story of hope, of one woman's journey to save her son and another woman's chance at redemption.

The Rent Collector was a great book club book. There were lots of amazing quotes to highlight and talk about. The power of literature is beautiful throughout the story. The idea that the story of Cinderella, which is in almost all cultures, shows that stories of hope like that are so fundamental that it comes from somewhere deeper.

“Whether we like it or not, hope is written so deeply into our hearts that we just can’t help ourselves.” – Camron Wright, The Rent Collector (kindle location 1809)

Sang Ly, the main character, is the first to write down a story that has been passed down for generations and it gave me chills.

I loved the message and the little stories in the plot by themselves, but as a whole they didn’t really have anything to do with each other. Sang Ly learns to read to make her son well again. She even finds a paper that says “How to Grow Rice” and someone added the words “and children.” That paper talked about the importance of the environment when growing rice. And it’s a huge theme in the book that in literature, everything means something. So to me, that set it up for them moving out of the dump and her son finally gets better! Nope. Sang Ly has a random dream about a healer so she takes he son there and he gets better. There’s no explanation for the treatment, why he picked it, what it does, or why the son was even sick. Going to a healer who doesn’t use Western medicine and it works where Western medicine had failed – cool story! It just has nothing to do with learning to read. Maybe this was because the story was based on a documentary called “River of Victory” and the events actually happened but he added the literature element and then didn’t make the literature theme fit correctly. Adding an un-true element to a true story made it feel thrown together like a puzzle that didn’t quite fit.

I learned a little about history that I hadn’t know before. I had never heard of the Khmer Rouge which was a mass killing of all the educated people in Cambodia. Sopeap was a character that had lived through this horrifying experience. She was educated and supposed to be killed but her housemaid took her place and she lived. There’s a quote in the book that says that “The hope of tomorrow is traded to satisfy the hunger of today.” Sopeap did that by feeding the “hunger” of her survivor’s guilt with money instead of spreading the hope of education to the children of tomorrow. Luckily she did teach one person – the main character, Sang Ly.

My favorite quote from Sopeap is this:

“Fight ignorance with your words. Fight evil with your knife.” – Camron Wright, The Rent Collector (kindle location 1495)

And another favorite quote:

“Sometimes broken things deserve to be repaired.” – Camron Wright, The Rent Collector (kindle location 548)

See? Lots of amazing quotes.

Book Review of The Rent Collector on a Post-it

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About Camron Wright

Camron Wright was born and raised in Salt Lake City, Utah. He has a master’s degree in Writing and Public Relations from Westminster College.

He has owned several successful retail stores in addition to working with his wife in the fashion industry, designing for the McCall Pattern Company in New York.

Camron began writing to get out of attending MBA school at the time, and it proved the better decision. His first book, Letters for Emily, was a Readers Choice Award winner, as well as a selection of the Doubleday Book Club and the Literary Guild. Letters for Emily has been published in North America, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Korea, the Netherlands, and China.

His next book, The Rent Collector, won Best Novel of the Year from the Whitney Awards and was a nominee for the prestigious International DUBLIN Literary Award. The Orphan Keeper won 2016 Book of the Year, Gold accolades in Multicultural Fiction from Foreword Reviews, and was winner of Best General Fiction from the Whitney Awards. He newest book, The Other Side of the Bridge, will be released in March of 2018.

Camron lives with his wife, Alicyn, just south of Salt Lake City at the base of the Wasatch Mountains. He is the proud father of four children, all girls but three.

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July 4, 2018 at 6:14 pm

I really liked this one, too. It’s so touching and definitely made me take note of all the little things in life that I take for granted every day. Glad you enjoyed it!

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Book Review: The Rent Collector by Cameron Wright

THE RENT COLLECTOR

By: Cameron Wright

Published:  August 27, 2012

Survival for Ki Lim and Sang Ly is a daily battle at Stung Meanchey, the largest municipal waste dump in all of Cambodia. They make their living scavenging recyclables from the trash. Life would be hard enough without the worry for their chronically ill child, Nisay, and the added expense of medicines that are not working. Just when things seem worst, Sang Ly learns a secret about the bad-tempered rent collector who comes demanding money–a secret that sets in motion a tide that will change the life of everyone it sweeps past. The Rent Collector is a story of hope, of one woman’s journey to save her son and another woman’s chance at redemption. I wasn’t sure what to expect from this book.  I figured it would be depressing and I couldn’t imagine how a story of people living in the dump was going to be much of a story to tell.  Well, I was completely wrong.  The story is told from Sang Ly’s perspective and she is quite the storyteller.  She is quite witty and had me laughing in the first chapter.  She is thoughtful, intelligent, and has a will to improve her life.  

Sang Ly is a wife, but most importantly a mother.  She thinks and feels like any mother in the world, with her focus on her son being healthy.  Isn’t that what every mother in the world wants?  No matter whether you live in a dump in Cambodia or a mansion in California, all a mother wants is for her child to be happy and healthy.  For Sang Ly, it was her sole purpose.  Sang Ly devises a plan for a better life and that dream involves her asking for help from someone she least expects to ask for help. 

The way of life for the people living at the dump and the descriptions of their homes and belongings were shocking to me.  The little things that were appreciated, their meager food portions, the constant struggle to survive were heartbreaking….and even more so knowing this truly is happening every day in Cambodia and other places around the world.  This story will remind you that possessions are just things and what truly matters in life is happiness, love, family, friends and your health.  Sang Ly and her husband Ki remind us that we make our own happiness, not by the things we have, but by spending time with those we love. 

This story is based on truth and is told about real people.  By going to www.TheRentCollectorBook.com  you will learn even more about the story of those who live at the dump.  I found the photos on the website and at the back of the book, fascinating and wonder how the people in the story are doing now.

This story is eye-opening, intellectual, heartbreaking, and inspirational.  It makes for an excellent book club discussion and questions are available on the book website.  

Camron Wright is an author I will be watching for in the future.  Camron Wright was born and raised in Salt Lake City, Utah. He has a master’s degree in Writing and Public Relations from Westminster College.

Posted Under Book Review , Cambodia , Cameron Wright , fiction , poverty

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The Rent Collector

Camron wright, ask litcharts ai: the answer to your questions.

Welcome to the LitCharts study guide on Camron Wright's The Rent Collector . Created by the original team behind SparkNotes, LitCharts are the world's best literature guides.

The Rent Collector: Introduction

The rent collector: plot summary, the rent collector: detailed summary & analysis, the rent collector: themes, the rent collector: quotes, the rent collector: characters, the rent collector: symbols, the rent collector: theme wheel, brief biography of camron wright.

Historical Context of The Rent Collector

Other books related to the rent collector.

• Full Title: The Rent Collector
• When Written: 2011
• Where Written: Salt Lake City, Utah
• When Published: 2012
• Literary Period: Contemporary
• Genre: Contemporary Fiction
• Setting: Various locations in Cambodia
• Climax: Sang Ly finds Sopeap Sin in her old house and sits with her as she dies.
• Antagonist: Sopeap Sin
• Point of View: First-person

Extra Credit for The Rent Collector

Real Characters. Although the story is largely fictionalized, many of the main characters and their personal struggles are based on real people using their real names as featured in the author’s son’s documentary River of Victory , released in 2010. Sang Ly, Ki Lim, Lucky Fat, and Teva Mao are all real people, and Sang Ly’s desperate search for healing for her infant son Nisay is inspired by the actual event.

Global Issue. The Stung Meanchey garbage dump still exists today and is still home to countless families like Sang Ly’s, and it is often mentioned as a famous example of the desolate conditions that waste pickers around the world live in.

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Book Review- The Rent Collector by Camron Wright

12 Sep, 2012 by Heather in Shadow Mountain 2 comments

The Rent Collector By Camron Wright Hardcover, 304 pages Published September 2012 by Shadow Mountain ISBN: 1609071220 Book Source: Publisher 5 Stars

Book Summary from Goodreads:  Survival for Ki Lim and Sang Ly is a daily battle at Stung Meanchey, the largest municipal waste dump in all of Cambodia. They make their living scavenging recyclables from the trash. Life would be hard enough without the worry for their chronically ill child, Nisay, and the added expense of medicines that are not working. Just when things seem worst, Sang Ly learns a secret about the bad-tempered rent collector who comes demanding money–a secret that sets in motion a tide that will change the life of everyone it sweeps past. The Rent Collector is a story of hope, of one woman’s journey to save her son and another woman’s chance at redemption.  Cathy’s review: Sang Ly lives with her husband Ki Lim and their son Nisay in the most unimaginable place for them to live, Stung Meanchey, a huge dump located in Cambodia. They are lucky to have a nice house to live in. Their house has 3 walls and they use a canvas tarp for the 4th. In order to get money, Sang Ly and Ki Lim must pick through the trash in the dump looking for recyclables to sell. This is a hard life, made harder by the fact that Nisay is a very sick little boy. He has almost constant diarrhea, that Sang Ly must scrub off of him and off of their home every day. To her, it’s not inconvenient, it’s just life. They have no running water, no electricity. And to add to the injustice of this, they must pay rent every month, to a woman that those living in the dump call a “Cow”, known in the beginning of the story as simply, The Rent Collector. This woman is perpetually drunk and she’s not known for being nice, in fact, she threatens at the very beginning of this book to kick out Sang Ly and her family for not paying all of their rent at the same time, even though their money had gone to buy more medicine for Nisay. When The Rent Collector, Sopeap Sin comes back for the money, Sang Ly knows they are going to be kicked out, they can’t pay now, because Ki Lim had been attacked by a gang and had to go to the doctor to be fixed up, but the oddest thing happens. Sopeap sees a book in Sang Ly’s house and asks to take it, Sang Ly can tell that she can read it by the way her eyes move and Sang Ly knows that if she can get Sopeap Sin to teach her, she can make a better life for Nisay. Thus begins a very unlikely friendship between two very different women, that will change both of their lives. This book really touched me. I had no idea that people actually lived in deplorable places like a dump before reading this. This book is a novel, but it’s based on the life of the true Sang Ly. I love Sang Ly and the others that inhabit the dump. I love how they are thrilled to have a place to live, even though it’s filled with garbage and infested with disease. I love how they keep trying to do all they need to do, for me I think it would get so overwhelming to try to get enough garbage to pay the rent every month. I love Sang Ly’s attitude, she really has nothing, but she’s so willing to help others. I want to be more like her, to be grateful for what I do have and not concerned with what I don’t.  I was really touched by something that Sang Ly’s Auntie said, so I’ll share it with you. Sang Ly has returned to the place where she grew up where her aunt and uncle live. She loves the change of scenery from the dump and says she would love to stay in the city where she grew up because the dump is ugly. Her Auntie replies, “…Remember, the province, though beautiful, has it’s own pockets of ugliness. While the dump is ugly, it also has pockets of beauty. I think finding beauty in either place simply depends on where you decide to stand.” That’s what I hope I can take from this book, if I can’t find beauty where I’m standing, maybe I simply need to change my vantage point until I can.

Content: A few mild swear words, violence in the dump

2 Responses to “Book Review- The Rent Collector by Camron Wright”

Suesann pommerenke.

When does this book take place?

I cannot figure out when this story takes place.

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The Rent Collector

Camron wright. shadow mountain (baker & taylor, dist.), $22.99 (304p) isbn 978-1-60907-122-6.

Reviewed on: 09/17/2012

Genre: Fiction

Paperback - 288 pages - 978-1-60907-705-1

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23 sep / the rent collector by camron wright.

Thumbs up: The Rent Collector is a father’s novel inspired by his son’s documentary, River of Victory . Not only is the story based on the experiences of real-life family, even many of the names appear unchanged. If you choose the page, you’ll be rewarded at book’s end with a bonus section of photos that speak further volumes.

Thumbs stuck in the mud: If you go audible, get ready to practice your eyeball-rolling – Diane Dabczyniski narrates with supposed-to-sound-Asian accents. The thoughtless implication is that the characters are unable to fluently speak their own language! Ironically, she stumbles through the names of people and places in the one language that required accuracy, Khmer, the official language of Cambodia. The result is inexcusable – author Camron Wright even provides a “ Pronunciation Guide ” on his highly detailed website. Again, audible producers: accuracy can be but a speedy Google search away!

Welcome to Stung Meanchey , Cambodia’s largest garbage dump, located on the outskirts of Phnom Penh, the country’s capital. Sang Ly, her husband Ki Lim, and their baby Nisay, live in a hovel in the dump, surviving day-to-day from what they can salvage and sell. They regularly struggle to pay the bitter, alcoholic Sopeap Sin, the dump’s titular rent collector. They are short again this month, their rent money spent on treatments for the chronically sickly Nisay.

In the midst of her latest ranting demands, Sopeap notices a precious book on the hovel’s floor that Ki Lim recently rescued. The sight of the children’s story causes the most unexpected reaction from Sopeap, as she flees in shattered tears. Sang Ly realizes that Sopeap can read, and she strikes a deal with the angry old woman to teach her the same. Sang Ly is sure of one thing: literacy is the path out of poverty, and the only lasting way to save her young son.

That Wright had detailed access to his son’s documentary gives his novel an overall sense of authenticity, although the narrative is not without the occasional missteps that might remind the reader that Wright is not a young Cambodian mother trapped in a city of garbage: would a person of the dumps know about fanciest restaurants in France; would she ever think in terms of parenting awards? Inconsistencies aside,  The Rent Collector  is a sprawling story populated with tragic characters (a young girl whose brother is determined to sell her into prostitution), horrific history (the inhumanity of the Khmer Rouge), and grave uncertainty (the dumps are only growing). While the novel doesn’t quite rival the beloved literature that Sopeap reverently introduces to the hungry Sang Ly, Wright’s unembellished, straight-forward prose is a story well-told … a story of grace for a life redeemed, of gratitude for a few lives saved, and ultimately of unwavering hope for a better future.

Readers : Adult

Published : 2012

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Danielle Dutton’s Surreal Take on Human Existence

“Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other,” the author’s new collection, ranges from a playful one-act drama set in a lake to short fiction rife with apocalyptic anxiety.

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PRAIRIE, DRESSES, ART, OTHER , by Danielle Dutton

Aspiring writers now get M.F.A.s in creative writing, instead of studying literature, and novelists end up teaching these people rather than attending to their own work. Almost any other day job would be preferable, since editing students’ literary efforts not only pays badly, it sucks exactly the same imaginative energy out of you that you need to write your own stuff. Once neutralized in this way, some writer-teachers compound the misstep by mining academe for material. Big mistake.

Danielle Dutton is a co-founder of the feminist press Dorothy and the author of two novels, including “ Margaret the First .” But alas, she teaches, and it shows. “Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other” is a medley of tangled nonfiction and some very intriguing fiction, linked by mentions of prairies. Dutton has spoken of her interest in pockets of wilderness and admirably pledges to send half this book’s profits to the Missouri Prairie Foundation .

A bolder project would have had more Prairie, less Other. Rather than engage with prairies here, Dutton writes quite a lot about swimming. In “Somehow,” a mother and child meet one of the woman’s male students when swimming in a local canal. The woman worries about how she looks to him in her bathing suit. That she’s also menstruating adds to her discomfiture, and these qualms give depth to the sexual encounter she and the student have later that day. The distance between people seems unreliable and ever-changing.

Awash with references to personages like Kant, Cate Blanchett, Mina Loy, Joseph Cornell and Agnès Varda, Dutton’s take on human existence is consistently surreal, her work a collage of dreamlike juxtapositions. In “Nocturne,” a mother and child on a road trip enact the age-old gender dissonance: her sensuality and warmth versus her son’s colder, more scientific outlook. They’re both obsessed with apocalypse, she fearing it, he almost courting it. The kid announces that rotting veal can sometimes glow and black holes make you explode, while the mother decides the car is “upside down on the bottom of the planet.” With threat lurking round every corner, things seem only temporarily held together, mostly through the efforts of maternal love.

Enlarging on the self-illuminating veal, another story includes a nice flurry of different forms of light: “cloud light … alarm clock light … bomb light.” A one-act drama called “Pool of Tears” strays amusingly from plausibility as a stage production. Again, there’s a lot of swimming. Some members of the audience even drown. Both actors and spectators speak, dwelling on pitless avocados and trees submerged in a man-made reservoir. But the play is marred by frequent allusions to writers like Amitav Ghosh and Mikhail Bakhtin and their pronouncements on climate change and fiction, making everybody involved sound far too academic.

A richer, wilder book lurks in the wings; perhaps the novel Dutton didn’t have time to write? Her efforts seem less startling in the nonfiction sections, which read like revamped lectures or magazine articles and offer a dutiful ragbag of postmodern buzz names — Georges Perec, Lydia Davis, Ludwig Wittgenstein, John Cage, Clarice Lispector and Kathy Acker. As any good teacher might, Dutton confronts us with wide-ranging allusions, thoughts and imagery, daring us to be flexible enough to relate to just about anything. But we’re not her students. We want more than hints of what stirs her. We want the real deal.

“At times it feels like all the stories that need to be written are written, and all the lives that need to be lived have been lived,” she writes. Too true. The object is to disprove that claim, though, not illustrate it.

PRAIRIE, DRESSES, ART, OTHER | By Danielle Dutton | Coffee House Press | 169 pp. | Paper, $17.95

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