A Man of Two Faces Tour | Cambridge— Harvard University
This event is free and open to the public with a ticket. Tickets will be available through the Harvard Box Office in-person, online, or over the phone.
PLEASE NOTE: Registration via Eventbrite does NOT count as a ticket to this event.
The Norton Lectures are free and open to the public, but tickets are required. Tickets will be available on the day of the lecture online through the Harvard Box Office or in person at Sanders Theatre, starting at noon.
The Norton Lectures with Viet Thanh Nguyen: “To Save and to Destroy: On Writing as an Other”
Lecture Two: On Speaking as an Other
Interlocutor: Laila Lalami
Timed to coincide with the release of Nguyen’s book, A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, A History, A Memorial, this lecture highlights some of the book’s themes and problems, especially concerning writing memoir as both an individual and a collective story, the perils of betrayal, and the difference between private secrets and open secrets.
The Norton Lectures are free and open to the public, but tickets are required. Tickets will be available on the day of the lecture online through the Harvard Box Office or in person at Sanders Theatre, starting at noon.
A limited number of signed copies of A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, A History, A Memorial will be available for purchase at the venue starting at 5:00pm. Other books by Viet Thanh Nguyen will also be available for purchase at this time. The book sale is hosted by the Harvard Book Store.
Free parking is available at the Broadway Garage, located at 7 Felton Street, between Broadway and Cambridge Streets.
“On Speaking as an Other” is the second of six Norton Lectures with Viet Thanh Nguyen. For all Lecture dates and information, click here.
About the Speakers
Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer is a New York Times best seller and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Other honors include the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the Edgar Award for Best First Novel from the Mystery Writers of America, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction from the American Library Association, the First Novel Prize from the Center for Fiction, a Gold Medal in First Fiction from the California Book Awards, and the Asian/Pacific American Literature Award from the Asian/Pacific American Librarian Association. His other books are Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (a finalist for the National Book Award in nonfiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award in General Nonfiction) and Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America.
He is a University Professor, the Aerol Arnold Chair of English, and a Professor of English, American Studies and Ethnicity, and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. He has been interviewed by Tavis Smiley, Charlie Rose, Seth Meyers, and Terry Gross, among many others. He is also the author of the bestselling short story collection, The Refugees. Most recently he has been the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations, and le Prix du meilleur livre étranger (Best Foreign Book in France), for The Sympathizer. He is the editor of The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives and the Library of America volume for Maxine Hong Kingston. He co-authored Chicken of the Sea, a children’s book, with his then six-year-old son, Ellison, and his most recent book is The Committed, the sequel to The Sympathizer. HBO is turning The Sympathizer into a TV series for 2023, directed by Park Chan-wook.
Laila Lalami was born in Rabat and educated in Morocco, Great Britain, and the United States. She is the author of five books, including The Moor’s Account, which won the American Book Award, the Arab-American Book Award, and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. It was on the longlist for the Booker Prize and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. Her most recent novel, The Other Americans, was a national bestseller, won the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, and was a finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction. Her essays and criticism have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, The Nation, Harper’s, the Guardian, and the New York Times. She has been awarded fellowships from the British Council, the Fulbright Program, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University. She is currently Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at the University of California at Riverside.
Introductions By:
Bruno Carvalho, Interim Director of the Mahindra Humanities Center.
Glenda Carpio, Chair of the Department of English, Harvard College Professor, and Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature at Harvard University.
About the Norton Lectures
The Charles Eliot Norton Professorship in Poetry was endowed in 1925. Harvard’s preeminent lecture series in the arts and humanities, the Norton Lectures recognize individuals of extraordinary talent who, in addition to their particular expertise, have the gift of wide dissemination and wise expression. The term “poetry” is interpreted in the broadest sense to encompass all poetic expression in language, music, or the fine arts.
