HCM City's annual book festival will opened by the municipal People's Committee on March 19 at Le Van Tam Park in District 1, featuring 200,000 titles this year, including hundreds of new ones. Books will be sold at discounts of up to 50 percent at 500 stalls.

The week-long event has attracted more than 160 international and Vietnamese publishers, distributors and other companies. The major foreign names include Penguin, MacMillan, Cambridge, Pearson, Learning, and Oxford. The Vietnamese participants will include the HCM City General Publishing House, National Politics Publishing House, Tre (Youth) Publishing House, and Kim Dong Publishing House. Among the popular titles on display will be Nguyen Van Hau's Van Hoc Mien Nam Luc Tinh (Southern Literature), a collection of three books on the lives and works of talented writers in the region in the 19th and 20th centuries. One of Kim Dong's best-selling titles, Nguyen Nhat Anh's Kinh Van Hoa (Kaleidoscope), a novel for children published in 1995, which has been reprinted, will be on display.

VNA/VOV