A Man of Two Faces Tour | Houston, Texas
Viet Thanh Nguyen will read from his new memoir A Man of Two Faces, followed by an on-stage conversation with Houston writer Bao Long Chu.
TICKETS: $5 general admission tickets on sale on this webpage starting on Monday, October 2 at 12 pm noon.
VIET THANH NGUYEN
VIET THANH NGUYEN, a MacArthur “genius” fellow, has “a voice that shakes the walls of the old literary comfort zone” (New Yorker). His debut novel The Sympathizer won the Pulitzer Prize, was a New York Times bestseller, and is being adapted into TV series by HBO. His second novel The Committed, his short story collection The Refugees, and his nonfiction book Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War, explore themes of the Vietnam War, colonization, and anti-Asian racism. Joyce Carol Oates calls Nguyen “one of the great chroniclers of displacement.” Nguyen’s other honors include the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction from the American Library Association, the First Novel Prize from the Center for Fiction, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
He joins us to read from and talk about his latest book, A Man of Two Faces, “a triumphant memoir that sears through the fog of American amnesia…a vulnerable and scorching mirror to self and to nation” (Cathy Park Hong). Focusing on Nguyen’s life coming to the U.S. as a refugee during the Vietnam War, losing his parents in a grocery store shooting, and meeting his adopted sister for the first time, Kirkus Reviews calls it a “kaleidoscopic memoir…. Deeply personal and intensely political…. Lyrical and biting, by one of our leading writers.” According to Susan Straight, “This book belongs with James Baldwin, Claude Brown, Maxine Hong Kingston, and other writers whose memoirs take apart ‘the American Dream’ with laser precision.” Nguyen is the Aerol Arnold Chair of English and a Professor of English, American Studies and Ethnicity, and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California.
Location:
Congregation Emanu El
1500 Sunset Boulevard
Houston, TX 77005
