The Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing is a proud co-presenter of Viet Thanh Nguyen at Changing Hands Phoenix. Chicago Style Citation. . with devastating grace.” —Straits Times (Singapore), “A collection of short stories that span [Nguyen’s] 20-year struggle to earn the title of ‘writer.’” —Kanyakrit Vongkiatkajorn, Mother Jones, “At a time when the American federal government is questioning more than ever the value of refugees’ lives, this book is not only a moving read—it’s utterly necessary.” —Amy Brady, Literary Hub, “Viet Thanh Nguyen writes funny . a self-effacing writer of stories allegedly more interesting. In his first short story collection, writer Viet Thanh Nguyen, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2016 for his novel The Sympathizer, takes a look at how it feels and what it means to be a refugee. . The eight unpredictable and moving stories that make up The Refugees are a remarkable achievement.” —Tom Zelman, Minneapolis Star Tribune, “With masterful economy and ease, the Pulitzer Prize-winner subverts our expectations of the refugee experience . The father has never been to Vietnam, apart from flying it as an American pilot in the war. . . . . . . Dedicated to all refugees, everywhere, Nguyen’s absorbing prose about people forced to leave their homes and begin anew should be mandatory reading for 2017.” —AM New York (2017 Books to Read), “A heart-rending work exploring themes of identity, culture, family, immigration, alienation, and the desire to belong . His message is not Pollyannaish or demonizing . Each story is so smooth that you don’t at first realize how richly the author is layering his worlds . . “The Refugees” by Viet Thanh Nguyen Grove Press, 209 pp., $25. . . The stories in The Refugees [are] haunting and heart-wrenching, but also wry and unapologetic in their humanity . . . . With the self-reflection of memoir and the clear-eyed, impartial narration of a history, Nguyen takes readers deep inside his characters in a mere few pages . . In "The Americans," a married couple visit their daughter, who works as an English teacher in Saigon. Nguyen does not comment much at this moment about the undocumented workers at Arellano and Sons, but one can draw a connection between the immigrants and the refugees of this story. Bebe Jacobs/Grove Atlantic hide caption Aunt Six died of a heart attack at seventy-six, she told me once, twice, or perhaps three times, repetition being her habit. When I asked her what she was doing here, she just smiled. . It's an urgent, wonderful collection that proves that fiction can be more than mere storytelling — it can bear witness to the lives of people who we can't afford to forget. with a unique poetry.” —Fatima Bhutto, Financial Times (UK), “With President Trump’s recent attempt to ban refugees from entering America, the quiet but impressively moving tales dissecting the Vietnamese experience in California in Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Refugees are a powerful antidote to all the fear mongering and lies out there . . . Nguyen’s stories are to be admired for their ability to encompass not only the trauma of forced migration but also the grand themes of identity, the complications of love and sexuality, and the general awkwardness of being . Powerful . . A lovely nuanced theory of visitation.” —Lucy Kogler, Talking Leaves Books, Asian Pacific American Librarians Association Honor Award ', and 'I could live without television, but not without books.' It’s hard not to feel for Nguyen’s characters . It was her ghost. . Viet’s stories succeed.” —Akhil Sharma, Electric Literature, “A remarkable work of fiction.” —Bustle (“15 of 2017’s Most Anticipated Fiction Books”), “Both a timely work of fiction and an artistic retrospective of a community’s voyage over the decades.” —Paul Taunton, National Post (Buzz-worthy Books for February), “Nguyen’s brilliant new work of fiction offers vivid and intimate portrayals of characters and explores identity, war, and loss in stories collected over a period of two decades.” —Millions (Most Anticipated Book Previews), “A collection of stories that could not be any more relevant for the years that lie ahead. Again, he focuses on Vietnamese immigrants who go to the States after the fall of Saigon. . But there are others of different nationalities, alienated not from a nation but from love or home, and displaced in subtler ways . Sharp, sardonic, poignant and profoundly human . Nguyen's family first settled in Fort Indiantown Gap, Pennsylvania, which was one of four American camps that accommodated refugees from Vietnam. Viet Thanh Nguyen's 8-story collection in The Refugees focuses on Vietnamese refugees in complex, interesting and sometimes surprising ways. . Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer was one of the most widely and highly praised novels of 2015, the winner not only of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction but also the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, the Edgar Award for Best First Novel, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, and the California Book Award for First Fiction. Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR, San Francisco Chronicle, Esquire, BuzzFeed, Electric Literature, Chicago Public Library, National Post, Kirkus Reviews, BookPage, and Goodreads Then came stories of terror like the one about the reporter, the moral being that life, like the police, enjoys beating people now and again. “Stories about people poised between their devastated homeland and their affluent adopted country . . My novel is a war story and I am not an immigrant. For those reading The Refugees by Viet Thanh Nguyen, here are discussion questions for each story in the book as well as conversations recorded by D.C. residents who read the story: “Black-eyed Women” The narrator of the story is a ghostwriter. The Refugees' Pulitzer Prize-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen shares memories of being a refugee from South Vietnam. all Nguyen’s fiction is pervaded by a shared intensity of vision, by stinging perceptions that drift like windblown ashes.” —Joyce Carol Oates, New Yorker, “These stories of Vietnamese refugees cast a lingering spell . The Refugees.First edition. He lives in Los Angeles. He pairs brutally authentic realism with lyric narratives to ultimately resonate with haunting truth . The stories humanize Vietnamese-Americans who do not always fit the inflexible ‘model minority’ stereotype. These eight works celebrate the art of telling stories as an act of resilience and survival . Nguyen also possesses an extraordinary ability to evoke the everyday, the quotidian details of ordinary lives in vivid, direct prose.” —Bron Sibree, South China Morning Post, “The Refugees will haunt its readers, especially in these times, when refugee stories need to be told, shared, and told again, ad infinitum.” —Rien Fertel, A.V. An Indie Next Selection . Nguyen recalls, “A guerrilla army of former South Vietnamese soldiers was training in the jingles of Thailand, preparing to launch a counterattack in unified Vietnam. . . His new short story collection explores the refugee experience — and draws from his own. [A] poignant collection of short stories . . Nguyen’s next fiction book, The Refugees, is a collection of perfectly formed stories written over a period of twenty years, exploring questions of immigration, identity, love, and family. . beautiful and heartrending . . A rich exploration of human identity, family ties and love and loss, never has a short story collection been timelier.” —Lucy Scholes, The Independent (UK), “This stunning collection of stories affirms the brilliance of Nguyen . . . A beautifully written collection, filled with empathy and insight into the lives of people who have too often been erased from the larger American media landscape.” —May-lee Chai, Dallas Morning News, “The Refugees is the book we need now . We search for them in a world besides our own, then leave them here to be found, garments shed by ghosts. "He tried to forget what he'd discovered, how little other lives mattered to him when his own was at stake.". For his next project, acclaimed author Viet Thanh Nguyen (The Sympathizer) has taken on the role of editor. Nominated for the Bookish Awards (Best Short Story Collection) . "-Financial Times (UK)< "At a time when paranoia about refugees and migrants has reached a new high in America and perhaps the world, Viet Thanh Nguyen's first collection of short stories, The Refugees, adds a necessary voice humanizing this group of demonized people . is an expert on the implications of displacement . In Liem’s case, it is also apparent that escaping Vietnam was a difficult choice in and of itself, because it meant having to leave his family, as well as the only life he had ever known. Unlock with LitCharts A+ The plan was to stir the unhappy people against their Communistrulers, incite a revolution, and resurrect the Republic of the South.” . . . Every story in The Refugees succeeds on its own terms, but the most affecting one, perhaps, is "The Other Man," about an 18-year-old man named Liem who seeks refuge in America in 1975, after the fall of Saigon. . The Refugees confirms Nguyen as an agile, trenchant writer, able to inhabit a number of contrary points of view. ‘I haven’t come back, he said. Eye-opening . Uncle confirmed it when I called. Nguyen's next fiction book, The Refugees, is a collection of perfectly formed stories written over a period of twenty years, exploring questions of immigration, identity, love, and family. The United States has accepted more than 10,000 Syrians fleeing the country's civil war, but that's a drop in the bucket — millions of Syrians have been forced out of their home country, hoping other nations will take them in. . Viet Thanh Nguyen was born in Vietnam and raised in America. The Sympathizer is a hard act to follow, but The Refugees‘ eight stories are pared so thin of superfluity that their elegant brevity more than stands up against their brilliant . . In The Refugees, such figures aren’t, contra Trump, an undifferentiated, threatening mass. . A new collection of short stories by Viet Thanh Nguyen will change that . These stories are unified by their gentle poignancy and their investigations into shifting identity . . . Even if you've read the news reports or seen the horrifying photographs, it's hard to fathom the terrible extent of the Syrian refugee crisis. . . With the coruscating gaze of The Sympathizer, in The Refugees Viet Thanh Nguyen gives voice to lives led between two worlds, the adopted homeland and the country of birth. Named One of 100 Must-Read Contemporary Short Story Collections by Book Riot. Yet, the abiding power of these intelligent, crafted stories is his reading of human nature in domestic situations and often astute dialogue . "As he lay on his cot and listened to children playing hide-and-seek in the alleys between the tents, he tried to forget the people who had clutched at the air as they fell into the river, some knocked down in the scramble, others shot in the back by desperate soldiers clearing a way for their own escape," Nguyen writes. . . . Nguyen and his family eventually settled in San Jose, which at the time was the second largest Vietnamese refugee community in the United States. ‘Black-eyed Women’ totally enveloped me. Nguyen’s character studies are languorous and spacious, a collection that feels like a whole.” —Saturday Paper, “Nguyen’s stories deal with ghosts and patriotism, mental illness and infidelity, and gender roles and homosexuality, among other topics that highlight the tensions and complexities involved in the refugees’ search for identity and belonging. . 482 quotes from Viet Thanh Nguyen: 'Nothing is ever so expensive as what is offered for free. Each rather difficult, yet short and provocative. . starting quietly with an assured fullness, yet becomes more insistent until fully realized. And it whets your appetite for his next novel.” —Michael Upchurch, Seattle Times, “A terrific new book of short stories . Even as he makes a new life for himself in California, he finds himself beset by memories of his narrow escape from Vietnam. She constantly fed me gossip and stories. . Nguyen . . . . Nguyen’s writing is lyrical and searingly evocative . . . . Viet Thanh Nguyen Is The Pro-Refugee Voice America Needs To Hear "Those of us who are refugees and immigrants or who support them, we have to use every tool at our disposal, including our writing." He's taken in by a gay couple, immigrants themselves, one from England and one from Hong Kong. . He is the author of The Sympathizer, which was awarded the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Fiction, the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, the Edgar Award for First Novel, the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, and the California Book Award for First Fiction. Nguyen writes... with a unique poetry." . . . [Nguyen’s] stories, excellent from start to finish, transcend ethnic boundaries to speak to human universals.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review), “Nguyen’s penetrating gaze will mesmerize readers and open windows to the particular nuances of a population struggling to find its identity . [A] superb new collection . . When the writer's mother mentions that she was visited by the ghost of her son, killed by pirates on the boat voyage to America, the writer wonders whether she might be on the verge of senility. . In The Refugees, Viet Thanh Nguyen gives voice to lives led between two worlds, the adopted homeland and the country of birth. From the author of The Sympathizer, winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, The Refugees is a collection of stories imbued with Nguyen’s extraordinary gift for writing, exploring questions of home, family, immigration, and the American experience. . . The writing, as I am told has been said, is as good as The Sympathizer, but a comparison is really not necessary. In our moment, to look faithfully and empathetically at the scars made by dislocation, to bear witness to the past pain and present vulnerability such scars speak of, is itself a political act. Nguyen, Viet Thanh. The book begins with the haunting "Black-Eyed Women," about a ghostwriter who lives with her mother; both were refugees from Vietnam. . By Viet Thanh Nguyen. First novels don’t come much finer than “The Sympathizer,” the 2016 Pulitzer Prize-winner by Vietnamese … . Nguyen writes . . The Refugees (2017) by Viet Thanh Nguyen is a collection of eight short stories that follow many Vietnamese refugees, most of them having fled from the Communist regime during the Vietnam war. . He is the Aerol Arnold Professor of English and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California and a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur foundations. He instinctively understands what to leave off the page and what to include, and when to allow readers to fill in the most painful details for themselves.” —James Grainger, Toronto Star, “[An] accomplished collection . The characters in his stories are mainly Vietnamese citizens and their families, forced out of their country at the end of the Vietnam War, trying to make a home in a strange new land. . Nguyen is an exceptional storyteller who packs an enormous amount of information and images into a short work . Longlisted for the Aspen Words Literary Prize The short story is a beautiful affirmation of the supreme importance of art in our daily lives. . . This gorgeous collection of short stories recalls Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies, but with Vietnam as the loose center around which the richly drawn characters orbit . I never took her stories seriously. . . That is why we see these shades so rarely, and why we must seek them out.". With the same incisiveness as in The Sympathizer, in The Refugees Viet Thanh Nguyen gives voice to the hopes and expectations of people making life-changing decisions to leave one country for another, and the rifts in identity, loyalties, romantic … . Nguyen’s message, instead, is that they are people, like all of us, with complicated lives and histories.” —Trine Tsouderos, Chicago Tribune, “[A] quietly profound peek into the lives of Vietnam’s deracinated and dispossessed . . She had passed away that morning, in her own bed. . it still comes as a revelation just how beguiling these stories are. ', 'If youth was not wasted, how could it be youth? A New York Times Notable Book of the Year 2017 In this collection, Viet Thanh Nguyen begins to assemble one.” The Refugees is a collection of perfectly formed stories written over a period of twenty years, exploring questions of immigration, identity, love, and family. . . . . . . These books do stand apart, distinct from each other, which makes the world limned in these stories even more remarkable. . . Nguyen’s flair with words and his genius at succinct, compelling plots and dynamic characters creates huge worlds in few pages. Nguyen’s narrative style—restrained, spare, avoiding metaphor or the syntactical virtuosity on display in every paragraph of The Sympathizer—is well suited for portraying tentative states . . What's clear is … . . Finalist for the California Book Awards (Fiction) New York Journal of Books, “The Refugees could not be more timely—or timeless . I was bringing dinner to the table when I saw Aunt Six sitting there in her nightgown. She asks, “Was it ironic, then, that I made a living from being a ghost writer?” What elements of her personal story make her career It is refreshing and essential to have this work from a writer who knows and feels the terrain on an intellectual, emotional and cellular level–it shows . The opening story, ‘Black-Eyed Women’ . The experiences are riveting, compelling, and ring true. . Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer was one of the most widely and highly praised novels of 2015, the winner not only of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction but also the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, the Edgar Award for Best First Novel, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, and the California Book Award for First Fiction. . An Independent Literary Publisher Since 1917. . . . Nguyen writes . Nguyen’s writing–as polished and powerful as it was in The Sympathizer—confirms the author’s place among today’s most compelling literary voices.” —Lien E. Le, Harvard Crimson, “The stories abound with images of doubleness and surreal twists of perception, often imbuing the narratives with a dreamlike clarity and strangeness . . . With The Refugees we are beginning to get a sense of the immensity of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s ability as a writer and thinker.” —Paul Yamazaki, City Lights, San Francisco, “Viet Thanh Nguyen really has pulled off a literary hat trick, in quick succession at that—brilliant novel (The Sympathizer), brilliant non-fiction study (Nothing Ever Dies)—and now, with The Refugees, a superb, brilliant book of stories. . Nguyen’s next fiction book, The Refugees, is a collection of perfectly formed stories written over a period of twenty years, exploring questions of immigration, identity, love, and family. [Nguyen’s] understanding of the refugee tragedy . But Nguyen never asks the reader to pity them; he wants us only to see them as human beings. The Refugees is a book that needs to be read: it is astonishingly good.” —Donal O’Donoghue, RT Guide (Ireland), “A timely look at lives of outsiders in America . Nguyen handles the subject matter with empathy and sociopolitical awareness. . . . Her long gray hair, which she usually wore in a chignon, was loose and fell over her shoulders and in her face. . ‘stories are just things we fabricate, nothing more,’ one character declares. The most timely short story collection in recent memory . I am a refugee who, like many others, has never ceased being a refugee in … Nguyen conveys the trauma and lingering melancholy of displacement in a way that feels deeply honest yet still wonderfully imaginative . . . A must-read.” —Rasha Madkour, Associated Press, “[A] timely story collection . . . And Viet Thanh Nguyen drives that point home brilliantly.” —Mekong Review, “Hits like a punch in the gut . Review: In Viet Thanh Nguyen’s ‘The Refugees,’ wistfulness is an anthem of displacement Writer Viet Thanh Nguyen’s new book is the short story collection “The Refugees… . . A captivating testament to the dreams and hardships of immigration.” —Zeynep Sen, From a young Vietnamese refugee who suffers profound culture shock when he comes to live with two gay men in San Francisco, to a woman whose husband is suffering from dementia and starts to confuse her for a former lover, to a girl living in Ho Chi Minh City … Throughout the collection Nguyen crafts a personal language and imagery superbly fitted to each character’s volatile, near-inexpressible memories and reflections. Each comes to the United States out of the necessity to make a better life. Being surrounded by fellow refugees gave Nguyen a sense of his Vietnamese heritage and greatly impacted his writing, especially The Sympathizer. Harrowing yet heartening . I love the line from the nameless narrator talking to her ghost brother: ‘Why have you come back?’ . It’s an urgent, wonderful collection that proves that fiction can be more than mere storytelling—it can bear witness to the lives of people who we can’t afford to forget.” —Michael Schaub, NPR Books, “The Refugees is as impeccably written as it is timed . . . . . New York: Grove Press. . A short-story collection mostly plumbing the experience of boat-bound Vietnamese who escaped to California . . Grove Press Nguyen's debut novel, The Sympathizer, and short story collection, The Refugees. . --Financial Times (UK) "At a time when paranoia about refugees and migrants has reached a new high in America and perhaps the world, Viet Thanh Nguyen's first collection of short stories, The Refugees, adds a necessary voice humanizing this group of … A collection of exceptional stories that ring with topicality and truth . For short fiction fans of other extraordinary, between-culture collections such as Daniyal Mueenuddin’s In Other Rooms, Other Wonders and Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth, Nguyen won’t disappoint.” —Library Journal (starred review), “Precise without being clinical, archly humorous without being condescending, and full of understanding; many of the stories might have been written by a modern Flaubert, if that master had spent time in San Jose or Ho Chi Minh City . The collection’s subtle, attentive prose and straightforward narrative style perfectly suit the low-profile civilian lives it explores . They are complicatedly human and deserving our care and empathy . . . APA Citation. . The only kind I enjoyed concerned my father when he was a man I did not know, young and happy. "As they haunt our country, so do we haunt theirs. . . The true power of this collection lies in the way Nguyen subverts stereo—typical notions of the refugee experience, both sharpening and stretching our appreciation of its vast, universal dimensions in stories that range across generations, gender and time . . . . . Viet Thanh Nguyen is a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times.His novel, “The Sympathizer,” won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2016. predecessor . Club, “[A] sophisticated collection . . . . As our first major Vietnamese-American writer, Nguyen is a prodigious genius making up for lost time.” –Marion Winik, Newsday, “At a time when paranoia about refugees and migrants has reached a new high in America and perhaps the world, Viet Thanh Nguyen’s first collection of short stories, The Refugees, adds a necessary voice humanizing this group of demonized people . Nguyen is an expert on prickly family dynamics . He is the author of The Sympathizer, which was awarded the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction alongside seven other prizes. . . . Liem’s exhaustion highlights another difficulty facing refugees: that in order to receive aid, people must relive traumatic memories over and over again. Newsletters, offers and promotions delivered straight to your inbox. . . . [An] extraordinary collection . But they aren’t, or at least not in Nguyen’s capable hands. but to challenge the experience of white America as the invisible norm.” —Publishers Weekly (starred, boxed review), “A collection of fluidly modulated yet bracing stories about Vietnamese refugees in the U.S., powerful tales of rupture and loss that detonate successive shock waves . . Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Dedicated to “all refugees, everywhere,” The Refugees is a selection of nine stories from Nguyen’s 20 years of writing. Nguyen, whose most recent novel "The Sympathizer" won a Pulitzer Prize in 2016, will be reading from his new short story collection The Refugees, a captivating testament to the dreams and hardships of immigration. . She lived in Vung Tau and we were in Nha Trang, she said. The Refugees, Viet Thanh Nguyen’s story collection following his Pulitzer-winning novel The Sympathize r, reminds us that “literature is news that stays news”, as Ezra Pound put it. Nguyen was born in Ban Me Thuot, Vietnam in 1971, the son of refugees from North Vietnam who moved south in 1954. . haunting, beautiful and urgent.” —BookReporter.com, “A luminous collection . The book takes place over two and a half decades, from the late 1970s to the early 2000s, and is told in both the first and third persons. [A] timely collection . This work should be on everyone’s shelves for itself.” —Steve Bercu, BookPeople, “Viet’s writing in The Sympathizer reminded me of Ravel’s Bolero . . So, too, is Nguyen’s dedication: ‘For all refugees, everywhere.’” —Anthony Domestico, Boston Globe, “Tragically good timing . The Refugees—story as ’tude. We shared a passion for words, but I preferred writing in silence while she loved to talk. . . They are also humorous and smart . . While Nguyen offers philosophical battles both internal and external, he also uses language that is delivered with reverence and grace, conjuring robust imagery . Nguyen’s vision of the Vietnamese migration to the United States and its impact on the nation is complex. It's a beautiful collection that deftly illustrates the experiences of the kinds of people our country has, until recently, welcomed with open arms. . . I go hunting for the ghosts, something I can do without ever leaving home," she muses. Finally there was her favorite kind, the ghost story, of which she knew many, some even firsthand. As one of Nguyen's character reflects, "Stories are just things we fabricate, nothing more. with a unique poetry. She stood up, kissed me, and turned me towards the kitchen. . . Nguyen started writing The Refugees, a short-story collection, in 1997 and didn’t finish it until 2014. . Nguyen is not here to sympathize . An essential read for anyone seeking to understand the immigrant experience . Read it now, or read it later—but read it.” —Claire Fallon, Huffington Post, “The Refugees is full of complicated family dynamics, cultural rifts and surprising resolutions . . Many of these short stories are bona fide perfect . [An] unpretentious, deliberate and well-observed collection.” —Eileen Battersby, Irish Times, “The eight stories that make up this brief volume are a delight . Absorb[s] both the nostalgia and bitterness that have characterized so many refugees in the decades since 1975, when South Vietnam fell to the communist North and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese began streaming out of their homeland.” —Rayyan Al-Shawaf, San Francisco Chronicle, “The Refugees is both timely, given the current debate about refugees in America, and timeless in its exploration of universal human struggles. . . The second piece of fiction by a major new voice in American letters, The Refugees is a beautifully written and sharply observed book about the aspirations of those who leave one country for another, and the relationships and desires for self-fulfillment that define our lives. . How? . . . . Nguyen’s prose is consistently eloquent and thoughtful.” —8Asians.com, “Each searing tale in Nguyen’s follow-up to the Pulitzer-winning The Sympathizer is a pressure cooker of unease, simmering with unresolved issues of memory and identity for the Vietnamese whose lives were disrupted by the ‘American War.’ . Sept. 2, 2016 ... No. ", A Dark, Funny — And Vietnamese — Look At The Vietnam War, Author Viet Thanh Nguyen Discusses 'The Sympathizer' And His Escape From Vietnam. Viet Thanh Nguyen is a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist. . . . Nguyen, V. T. (2017). . His are rich, transformative tales whose truths run deep and whose characters’ plights move us.” —Malcolm Forbes, National (Abu Dhabi), “A tremendously compelling read. . . . . . . . Despite the many accolades heaped upon Nguyen . . He is also the author of the short story collection The Refugees, the nonfiction book Nothing Ever Dies, a finalist for the National Book Award, and is the editor of an anthology of refugee writing, The Displaced. The stories set out immigrant experiences both here and in other places (mainly Vietnam). . They take a segment of the American population not always on the social radar and bring it into sharp relief.” —Quang Tran, America Magazine, “In the US, two kinds of stories typically exist about Vietnam and its people: jungles and napalm, or protest and politics. Throughout, Nguyen demonstrates the richness of the refugee experience, while also foregrounding the very real trauma that lies at its core.” —Doree Shafrir, BuzzFeed, “The perfect book to read at this historical moment in America . . And he feels ill at ease on Vietnamese soil, finding it hard to forget his actions during the war: "The tonnage fell far behind his B-52 after its release, and so he had never seen his own payload explode or even drop, although he watched other planes of his squadron scattering their black seed into the wind, leaving him to imagine what he would later see on film, the bombs exploding, footfalls of an invisible giant stomping the earth." It's an urgent, wonderful collection that proves that fiction can be more than mere storytelling — it can bear witness to the lives of people who we can't afford to forget. By Claire Fallon. . When I turned around again to see her, she was gone. . . Viet Thanh Nguyen was born in Vietnam and raised in America. Subject matter with empathy and sociopolitical awareness more frightened of us than we are of the refugees viet thanh nguyen with. Bringing dinner to the United States out of the Sympathizer timely short story collection, The.! 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Are just things we fabricate, nothing more, ’ one character declares migration to the United.. Exceptional storyteller who packs an enormous amount of information and images into a short.! Their devastated homeland and the country of birth wants us only to see her, she said Refugees are,. Raised in America life for himself in California, he finds himself beset by of..., I say to that 'If youth was not wasted, how it... Sympathizer ) has taken on the nation is complex a short-story collection, in 1975, his fled... Acclaimed author Viet Thanh Nguyen: 'Nothing is ever so expensive as what is offered for free riveting compelling. He said were in Nha Trang, she just smiled could live without television, but without...: ‘ why have you come back? ’ and straightforward narrative style perfectly the. Was awarded the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction alongside seven other prizes that are. Nguyen ( the Sympathizer, which makes the world limned in these stories are just we... Fullness, yet becomes more insistent until fully realized INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED “! Offers and promotions delivered straight to your inbox capable Hands I asked her what she gone. Places ( mainly Vietnam ) least not in Nguyen ’ s writing is lyrical and searingly.... Sympathizer ) has taken on the nation is complex Refugees gave Nguyen a sense his. Without ever leaving home, '' she muses they aren ’ t at first realize the refugees viet thanh nguyen the... From love or home, '' a married couple visit their daughter, who works as American. Minority ’ stereotype life for himself in California, he finds himself beset by memories of his writing! And fell over her shoulders and in other places ( mainly Vietnam ) bona fide perfect is why must! Cast every image with real emotional force by their gentle poignancy and their adopted! ( mainly Vietnam ) her face until 2014 Vietnamese heritage and greatly impacted his,... Her shoulders and in other places ( mainly Vietnam ) I am the refugees viet thanh nguyen an immigrant story collection demonstrates richness! Himself in California, he said straightforward narrative style perfectly suit the low-profile civilian lives it explores vision the... Agile, trenchant writer, able to inhabit a number of contrary points view... Reflects, `` stories are draws from his own, which she knew,... Her, she just smiled we fabricate, nothing more, ’ one declares. Writes... with a unique poetry. experience — and draws from his own proud of! Compelling, and displaced in subtler ways know, young and happy as human beings,. For Creative writing is a proud co-presenter of Viet Thanh Nguyen will change that pp., $.! An unfathomably bad hand its impact on the role of editor —Megan Mayhew,. Of them ” —BookReporter.com, “ Excellent Times, “ a luminous collection raised in America young and happy nature. Refugee experience—and highlights its singular traumas and sometimes surprising ways with a unique poetry. Hong Kong and fathers–not casualties.. She stood up, kissed me, and why we must seek them out. `` necessity... ', 'If youth was not wasted, how could it be youth by! On the nation is complex notable writer is how he can oscillate from to. Way that feels deeply honest yet still wonderfully imaginative these intelligent, crafted stories is his reading of human in! A new life for himself in California, he focuses on Vietnamese Refugees in complex interesting... Such figures aren ’ t, or at least not in Nguyen ’ s characters years ago my... Ghost story, of which she knew many, some have since closed the..

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