What Comes After the Trauma of Fleeing: ‘The Refugees’ by Viet Thanh Nguyen
Jasmine Lee Ehrhardt reviews Viet Thanh Nguyen’s ‘The Refugees’. Originally published by ZYZZYVA, a San Francisco Journal of Arts and Letters. The Refugees (224 pages; Grove), the new book by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen, consists of eight stories circling around the displacement caused by the Vietnam War. Though reviewers of the collection have tied the […]
2017 AWP Book Fair: Viet Thanh Nguyen on The Refugees
Viet Thanh Nguyen talks with Jeffrey Brown of PBS’ Book View New about his latest novel, “The Refugees” at the 2017 AWP Book Fair. With The Refugees, Pulitzer Prize winner Viet Thanh Nguyen (The Sympathizer) gives voice to Vietnamese lives affected by the shock of sudden departure from one’s home, of lives lived between the adopted […]
Voice of a refugee’s pain
Viet Thanh Nguyen discusses The Refugees and his personal experiences in this interview for Strait Times. Pulitzer-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen draws on his early years as a refugee in the US to write his short story collection. Growing up as a Vietnamese refugee in California, author Viet Thanh Nguyen saw a sign in a […]
Viet Thanh Nguyen The Refugees
Viet Thanh Nguyen discusses The Refugees with Michael Cathcart in this interview for ABC Melbourne Radio National. The writer Viet Thanh Nguyen was born in Vietnam as that war was coming to an end, and raised in the USA. He teaches English and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California and lives in Los […]
8Books Reviews The Refugees
Lily Wong of 8Asians reviews The Refugees. Viet Thanh Nguyen’s newest book, The Refugees, is a luminous collection of eight short stories that takes piercingly intimate looks at the lives of refugees, of those caught between worlds, of those caught in a moment. The Pulitzer Prize winning author’s recent books included The Sympathizer, a wry novel about […]
Necessary Fiction: The Refugees
Necessary Fiction‘s Emily Hoover reviews The Refugees, Viet Thanh Nguyen’s newest short story collection. About his 1980 novel Antwerp, Chilean author Roberto Bolaño once said: “I wrote this book for the ghosts, who, because they’re outside of time, are the only ones with time.” In an age of closing borders and building walls, it is […]
The One Book You Need To Read To Understand The Plight Of Refugees
Claire Fallon reviews The Refugees for The Huffington Post’s ‘The Bottom Line’. In nine psychologically evocative short stories, Viet Thanh Nguyen lays bare the trauma and emotional ambivalence that lie beneath sentimental or heroic tales of refugees. The Refugees, Viet Thanh Nguyen’s fiction follow-up to his acclaimed debut novel, The Sympathizer, would be critically praised […]
Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Refugees: Restrained Cast of Displaced People
James Grainger of the Toronto Star reviews The Refugees, Viet Thanh Nguyen’s short story collection. In follow-up to award-winning debut The Sympathizer, Nguyen instinctively understands what to leave off the page, what to include, and when to allow readers to fill in the most painful details. Literary award juries are not noted for rewarding bold, […]
Reading a Pulitzer Winner’s Stories About Refugees as Particularly Piquant in the Trump Era
Anu Kumar of Scroll.in reviews Viet Thanh Nguyen’s short story collection, The Refugees. A meme bearing a much-cited Naguib Mahfouz quote has been doing the internet rounds recently: “…Home is where all attempts to escape cease.” Words that seem particularly relevant and poignant at this juncture, with the world facing a refugee and humanitarian crisis, […]
Vietnam War revisited by author Viet Thanh Nguyen
Peter Pierce reviews Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War, The Sympathizer, and The Refugees for The Weekend Australian. Last year, not long after the publication of his Pulitzer prize-winning novel The Sympathizer, Viet Thanh Nguyen released a nonfiction analysis, impassioned yet forensic, of ‘‘Vietnam and the memory of war’’. This book […]
The Saturday Paper: The Refugees
CR of Australia’s Saturday Paper reviews The Refugees, Viet Thanh Nguyen’s short story collection. In this sophisticated collection by Vietnamese-American Viet Thanh Nguyen, whose novel The Sympathizer won the Pulitzer Prize last year, eight individuals seek meaning from the past, or just as often, find this meaning takes them unawares, when they are busy with […]
The Refugees Review: Insight Into Belonging Without Losing Identity
Eileen Battersby of the Irish Times reviews The Refugees. A Vietnamese woman living again with her now widowed mother recalls the terror of being crammed onto an overloaded fishing vessel as her parents fled with her and her brother some 25 years earlier in hope of a life elsewhere. She was only a child yet […]
Vietnam War Revisited by Author Viet Thanh Nguyen
Peter Pierce reviews Viet Thanh Nguyen’s three latest works, Nothing Ever Dies, The Sympathizer, and The Refugees, for The Australian. Last year, not long after the publication of his Pulitzer prize-winning novel The Sympathizer, Viet Thanh Nguyen released a nonfiction analysis, impassioned yet forensic, of ‘‘Vietnam and the memory of war’’. This book is titled […]
Author Viet Thanh Nguyen, who appears in Santa Ana on Tuesday, discusses his journey as a writer
This is Part 2 of Peter Larsen’s interview with Viet Thanh Nguyen for the Orange County Register. You can read Part 1 here. Even as a refugee child some 40 years ago, Viet Thanh Nguyen remembers loving the books he found everywhere in his first American hometown of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. “Some of my earliest memories […]
Star Tribune: The Refugees
Tom Zelman reviews The Refugees by Viet Thanh Nguyen for the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Uprooted populations, filling enclaves in First World cities or subsisting for years in refugee camps around the world. Scapegoats for joblessness and terror, people leaving scenes of violence in their home countries. Images in the media of suffering that lose their […]
