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 […]
Pulitzer Prize winner’s new book: Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War by Viet Thanh Nguyen
Stephen Cohen reviews Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War for Vietnam Full Disclosure. Pulitzer Prize winning novelist, Viet Thanh Nguyen, in his challenging new work of non-fiction, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War, reminds us that “all wars are fought twice…the second time in memory” (4) The war involving […]
8Books Reviews Nothing Ever Dies
Lily Wong of 8asians reviews Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War. The second book out from author Viet Thanh Nguyen, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War, is a sharp non-fiction work that deals in the theoretical world of remembrance, forgetting, humanity, and its lack. Nguyen is much in the news these […]
In Vietnam, forgetting the ‘American war’
Brian Bethune reviews Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War for Maclean’s. Memory is much on our minds now in regard to war, if only because we are reliving, through 100th anniversary lenses, the war that changed the way we remember war. To read Nguyen, a beautiful stylist and a subtle prober of […]
Booklist Gives Nothing Ever Dies a Starred Review
Donna Seaman reviews Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War for Booklist. Nguyen’s debut novel, The Sympathizer (2015), a complex tale of the Vietnam War, garnered the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and landed on more than two dozen best-of-the-year lists. Readers will discover the roots of Nguyen’s powerful fiction in […]
The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen review – a bold, artful debut
Randy Boyagoda reviews Viet Thanh Nguyen’s debut novel, The Sympathizer, for The Guardian. This hot and sprawling tale captures the horror and absurdity of the Vietnam war and its aftermath. ‘I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces. Perhaps not surprisingly, I am also a man of two minds. I am […]
ArtsHub Reviews The Sympathizer
A compelling spy story, a black comedy, a war story, The Sympathizer is also a piercing, revealing look at American attitudes to Asia and Asians. Katie Lavers wrote this review for ArtsHub Australia. The Sympathizer opens in the midst of turmoil and confusion with people rushing to leave Saigon as the city falls to the […]
Library Journal Reviews Nothing Ever Dies
Joshua Wallace of the Library Journal reviews Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War. What does it mean to remember a war? Nguyen (English, Univ. of Southern California; The Sympathizer) explores this question through a critical analysis of the films, literature, cemeteries, statues, video games, etc. that memorialize the Vietnam War in the […]
Kirkus Reviews: Nothing Ever Dies is “Powerful”
Kirkus Reviews calls Viet’s new book “powerful,” in the first pre-publication review of Nothing Ever Dies, coming out in April from Harvard University Press. A scholarly exploration of memory and the Vietnam War from an author “born in Vietnam but made in America.” While Nguyen (English and American Studies & Ethnicity/Univ. of Southern California; The Sympathizer, […]
The Irish Times: Crime Fiction Reviews
Declan Burke features The Sympathizer on their list of crime fiction reviews. Read the rest of the article on The Irish Times.The Sympathizer (Corsair, €28.50), Viet Thanh Nguyen’s debut novel and last year’s winner of the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, opens with the unnamed narrator informing us that “I am a spy, a […]
Financial Times Reviews The Sympathizer
Lawrence Osborne reviews Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer. Originally published by The Financial Times. The literature of the Vietnam war is curious in its incompleteness. On the American side, the war has mostly been immortalised in the memoirs of people who witnessed it, from Philip Caputo to Michael Herr to Nathaniel Tripp. These are intense recreations […]
