Winner of the Pulitzer Prize

Review: “Nothing Ever Dies” By Viet Thanh Nguyen

Bill Schwab reviews Viet Thanh Nguyen’s “Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War”. Originally published by The Missourian.  “All wars are fought twice,” writes Viet Thanh Nguyen. “The first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.” Born in Vietnam in 1971 and raised in San Jose, Nguyen began testing this hypothesis […]

The Public Historian Review of Nothing Ever Dies

This review of Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War by Margaret B. Bodemer was originally published in Volume 39 of The Public Historian, on pages 139-141. How can anyone support war when they have witnessed it firsthand, listened to survivors’ stories, or even read about its ‘‘human costs’’? This thought echoed in […]

Nothing Ever Dies Wins the 2017 John G. Cawelti Award for the Best Textbook/Primer

Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War wins the 2017 John G. Cawelti Award for the Best Textbook/Primer. This PCA/ACA Award is given for noteworthy textbooks, primers, and scholarly books used in the classroom on Popular Culture and American Culture. Committee Chair:  Kraig Larkin kraig.larkin@colby-sawyer.edu RAY & PAT BROWNE AWARDS RAY & PAT BROWNE AWARD FOR […]

This Is Hell! On the Limitations of Memory and the Persistence of War

Chuck Mertz, host of This is Hell! podcast, talks with Viet Thanh Nguyen about his book Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War. Listen to the interview through the SoundCloud player or read the transcript below. Writer Viet Thanh Nguyen explores the ways war wins itself in the minds of the American public – […]

Watch Viet Thanh Nguyen at the 2016 Wisconsin Book Festival on C-SPAN

Presented in partnership with the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Pulitzer Prize winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen will discuss his two latest books, The Sympathizer and Nothing Ever Dies, at the Wisconsin Book Festival. Here is the transcript: Speaker 1: Book TV on C-SPAN2’s live coverage of the Wisconsin Book Festival at the Madison Public […]

Literary Lion Viet Thanh Nguyen is Short Listed for the National Book Award

USC Dornsife’s Viet Thanh Nguyen follows up his Pulitzer Prize win for fiction with a spot on the short list of the National Book Awards — this time for nonfiction. This article was originally written by Susan Bell for USC Dornsife News & Events. Viet Thanh Nguyen, Aerol Arnold Chair of English and associate professor […]

Nothing Ever Dies on the Longlist for National Book Award in Nonfiction

Viet Thanh Nguyen’s latest novel, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War, is among 10 books nominated for the National Book Award in the nonfiction category. The following article was originally published by US News. Viet Thanh Nguyen, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction last spring for his novel “The Sympathizer,” is now in the […]

Radcliffe Magazine Reviews “Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War”

This review of “Nothing Ever Dies” appears in the summer 2016 edition of Harvard University’s Radcliffe Magazine.  While Viet Thanh Nguyen’s stirring argument for a new ethics of war and remembrance relies on his extensive exploration of the relevant literature (a 20-page bibliography offers an excellent reading list), this book’s power derives from Nguyen’s own […]

Memories of Vietnam in Memoriam

Micharl Orr reviews Viet Thanh Nguyen’s book Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War for Origins. How do people talk about wars they remember?  Do they reference famous films or novels about the conflict?  Do they recall images made by famous journalists, taken in moments of pain or horror?  Do societies remember war, or […]

The Moderate Voice Reviews Nothing Ever Dies

Shaun Mullen of The Moderate Voice reviews Viet Thanh Nguyen’s book, Nothing Ever Dies. Every American generation, it seems, has its own war. My grandparents had the Great War, my parents had the Good War, and I had the Vietnam War, with the Forgotten War in between. My children had the Iraq War and, at […]

A Right Way to Remember?

Jonathan Mirsky reviews both Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War and Christopher Goscha’s The Penguin History of Modern Vietnam for the July 2016 issue of the Literary Review. In Nothing Ever Dies, his unusually thoughtful consideration of war, self- deception and forgiveness, Viet Thanh Nguyen penetrates deeply into memories of […]

Viet Thanh Nguyen Is a Lucid and Robust Voice for the Forgotten

Matthew Snider reviews Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War for PopMatters. Near the beginning of Nothing Ever Dies, Viet Thanh Nguyen draws on Freud to explain the book’s theme of remembering and forgetting in relation to war. Nguyen writes, “A just memory suggests that we must work through the past or else […]

Publishers Weekly on Nothing Ever Dies

Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War is reviewed by Publishers Weekly. Vietnam-born, American-raised Nguyen (The Sympathizer), an associate professor of English and American Studies at the University of Southern California, sifts through the many guises of memory and identity in this eloquent, scholarly narrative of the Vietnam War’s psychological impact on combatants […]

Briefly Noted: Nothing Ever Dies

Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War is reviewed in The New Yorker‘s ‘Briefly Noted’ section. The winner of this year’s Pulitzer Prize for fiction here examines the cultural memory of the Vietnam War, both in the U.S. and in Asia. In thematically arranged chapters—on remembrance, forgetting, and spectacle—he produces close readings of […]