War, Memory, and Vietnam: An Interview with Viet Thanh Nguyen
Viet Thanh Nguyen discusses Nothing Ever Dies and his personal experiences in this interview for the History News Network. The troubling weight of the past is especially evident when we speak of war and our limited ability to recall it. Haunted and haunting, human and inhuman, war remains with us and within us, impossible to […]
Viet Thanh Nguyen’s latest work is a nonfiction companion to his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel
Viet Thanh Nguyen discusses Nothing Ever Dies and the history of the Vietnam War in this interview for USC Dornsife. USC Dornisfe’s Viet Thanh Nguyen delivers an acclaimed nonfiction work on the Vietnam War that raises questions about the ethics of memory as he explores how different countries remember the conflict. In Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam […]
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 – […]
Journal of International and Global Studies on Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War
The following is a review by Michael G. Vann, written on Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Nothing Ever Dies for the Journal of International and Global Studies. In Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, Robert Duvall as Colonel Kilgore leads an assault on a sleepy coastal Vietnamese village. After an unforgettable helicopter attack set to Wagner’s “Flight of the […]
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 […]
Mekong Review: More Than Just Memory
Patrick Deer reviews both The Sympathizer and Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War for the Mekong Review. In a recent interview, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Vietnamese American novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen describes his ambition “to be able to write fiction like criticism and criticism like fiction” in reshaping contemporary representations of war and memory. […]
Pulitzer Winner Viet Thanh Nguyen Explores War and its Aftermath
Elizabeth Rosner of the San Francisco Chronicle reviews Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War. “All wars are fought twice,” writes Viet Thanh Nguyen. “The first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.” It’s a notion that Nguyen, born in Vietnam in 1971 and raised in San Jose, has been exploring […]
