Anthony Veasna So’s Afterparties will be developed for television.
Adaptation news: Deadline has reported that Garrett Basch’s new company Dive (What We Do in the Shadows, Reservation Dogs) has won the television rights to Anthony Veasna So’s bestselling story collection Afterparties. Dive plans to turn the collection into a half-hour series—“a naturalistic comedy with heart”—based on the characters and world of Afterparties, which heavily features Cambodian-Americans living in California.
Playwright and television writer Lauren Yee will executive produce along with Dive. Yee is the Whiting Award-winning writer of many plays including Cambodian Rock Band and The Great Leap; she’s currently developing Celeste Ng’s Everything I Never Told You as a limited series for Annapurna, A-Major, and Apple, and just wrote for the Apple/Media Res TV adaptation of Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko.
George Saunders described So’s stories in Afterparties as “like beams of wry, affectionate light, falling from different directions on a complicated, struggling, beloved American community.” So died of an overdose shortly before Afterparties was published. Wrote Deborah Eisenberg reviewing Afterparties for the New York Review of Books, “The presence of the author is so vivid in [Afterparties], he seems to be at your elbow as you read.”
