Hereafter, Faraway
Viet Thanh Nguyen writes about his refugee experience in this essay for The New Yorker. My eternal scene takes place in a faraway country, the one in which I was born and of which I have no memory. My mother’s death was for me the closing of a door that had moved almost imperceptibly but […]
A Novelist’s Exuberant Love Letter to a Mexican-American Clan
Viet Thanh Nguyen reviews Luis Alberto Urrea’s The House of Broken Angels for The New York Times. Luis Alberto Urrea’s sorrowful and funny new novel, “The House of Broken Angels,” is one of those epic books about a complicated family that typically begin with a family tree to help the reader make sense of the relationships. Fortunately, […]
Viet Thanh Nguyen Reveals How Writers’ Workshops Can Be Hostile
Viet Thanh Nguyen’s critique of American writers’ workshops for The New York Times. Literature and power cannot be separated. American literature is read around the world not only because of its inherent value, but because the rest of the world always reads the literature of empires. A new development is that the American way of […]
A Refugee Crisis in a World of Open Doors
Viet Thanh Nguyen reviews Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West for The New York Times. You own a house or rent an apartment. You live with your family or by yourself. You wake in the morning and drink your coffee or tea. You drive a car or a motorbike, or perhaps you take the bus. You go to work […]
Trump Is a Great Storyteller. We Need to Be Better.
Viet published an op-ed in the New York Times about storytelling in the age of Trump. Here is the unedited, 1400-word version. The link to the 900-word published version comes at the end. My son is three years old. Every morning and evening I read to him. I love the joy he takes in learning […]
