Cross-cultural bluesman Lapcharoensap: How do you like my Thai? photo: June Glasson Sightseeing By Rattawut Lapcharoensap Grove, 224 pp., $22 Buy this book more books most popular most commented A G.I.'s Strange War Tale by Sean Gardiner Horacio Castellanos Moya Does the Twisted by Jed Lipinski The 2008 New Yorker Cartoon Standings by BRIAN PARKS Sasa Stanisic Turns Gruesome History Beautiful by Sidra Durst Rivka Galchen's Twisty Mistaken Identities by zach baron Trash Talking With Harvey Weinstein by Tony Ortega Coming and Then Licking It Up. Is This a Gay Thing? Savage Love by Dan Savage At Home With Competitive Swallowers Crazy Legs and Eater X by Andy Kropa Gene Simmons and the Whores He Admires La Dolce Musto by Michael Musto Columbia's Knotty Noose Problem by Graham Rayman The 'W.' Stands for 'War Criminal' (17) Nat Hentoff Scientology's Crushing Defeat (15) Tony Ortega Runnin' Scared: From Brooklyn, a Rap Campaign Against Tight Clothes (9) Runnin' Scared: Arcynta Ali Childs Runnin' Scared: The City Pitted Kids Against Artists in the East Village (6) Runnin' Scared: Chloé A. Hilliard Savage Love: My Boyfriend Almost Fathered a Lesbian Couple's Baby?!? (5) Savage Love: Dan Savage

The opening story, "Farangs," acknowledges the long-term psychic toll of professional hospitality while also conceding that objectification cuts both ways: "Pussy and elephants. That's all these people want," the narrator's motel-keeper mother grumbles, even as her son eagerly succumbs to the charms of a vacationing American babe in a Budweiser bikini. But Sightseeing, time and again, manages to turn such swirling contradictions into tidy coming-of-age truisms, politely resisting the free fall of deeper desires and resentments. What's more, the symbolic East-West collisions are often clumsy: One character's first taste of a fast-food burger causes him to throw up.

Lapcharoensap's Thailand isn't exactly touristy, but no less than in self-conscious Western sojourns like Alex Garland's The Beach and Michel Houellebecq's Platform, it can seem routinely exotic: We get the expected glimpses of brothels, street markets, and cockfight rings, along with dutifully unglamorous nods to methamphetamine addiction and government corruption. The more successful stories attempt some sort of inversion: "Don't Let Me Die in This Place" tries on the embittered, bigoted voice of a stroke-paralyzed widower who moves from Baltimore to Bangkok to live with his son, his Thai daughter-in-law, and their "mongrel children." "Priscilla the Cambodian" shifts focus to a different class of foreigner: Cambodian refugees, matter-of-factly withstanding the brutal xenophobia of the natives. The title story follows a mother and son on holiday —his last year before college, her last before she loses her sight: locals behaving like tourists, reveling in the perspective of home as a strange land for the first and final time.