{"id":4718,"date":"2017-11-07T15:26:42","date_gmt":"2017-11-07T23:26:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vietnguyen.info\/?p=4718"},"modified":"2018-06-23T09:47:05","modified_gmt":"2018-06-23T16:47:05","slug":"4718","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vietnguyen.info\/2017\/4718","title":{"rendered":"Kirkus Reviews Best Fiction 2017"},"content":{"rendered":"

Viet Thanh Nguyen’s <\/em>The Refugees was featured in\u00a0Kirkus Reviews Best Fiction of 2017<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

KIRKUS REVIEW<\/h3>\n

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A collection of stories, most set amid the Vietnamese exile communities of California, by the author of the Pulitzer Prize\u2013winning novel\u00a0The Sympathizer<\/i>\u00a0(2015).<\/p>\n

\u201cWe had passed our youth in a haunted country,\u201d declares the narrator of the opening story, a ghostwriter who quite literally finds himself writing about ghosts. One in particular is the ghost of his brother, lost somewhere in the chaos of the Vietnam War, who has somehow managed to swim across the ocean to find his family and is now dripping in their hallway. He is not the only ghost: there are other civilians, the eviscerated Korean lieutenant blown apart in a treetop, the unfortunate black GI, “the exposed half-moon of his brain glistening above the water,\u201d and the Japanese private from another war\u2014so many ghosts, so much horror. Some of the living are not much better off. There is, for example, the Madame Thieu\u2013like operator who works the merchants of a refugee shopping district, demanding what amounts to protection money and darkly hinting that they might be accused of being Communists if they do not pay up; she nurses a terrible grief, but that does not make her any less criminal. And then there is the 30-something divorc\u00e9, torn between cultures, who cannot seem to find himself in the midst of all the expectations others hold for him but is still enraged when others disappoint him in turn. Nguyen\u2019s slice-of-life approach is precise without being clinical, archly humorous without being condescending, and full of understanding; many of the stories might have been written by a modern Flaubert, if that master had spent time in San Jose or Ho Chi Minh City.<\/p>\n

Nguyen is the foremost literary interpreter of the Vietnamese experience in America, to be sure. But his stories, excellent from start to finish, transcend ethnic boundaries to speak to human universals.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Refugees was featured in\u00a0Kirkus Reviews Best Fiction of 2017. KIRKUS REVIEW A collection of stories, most set amid the Vietnamese exile communities of California, by the author of the Pulitzer Prize\u2013winning novel\u00a0The Sympathizer\u00a0(2015). \u201cWe had passed our youth in a haunted country,\u201d declares the narrator of the opening story, a ghostwriter […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4309,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_mo_disable_npp":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[208],"tags":[777,124,261,304,10,120],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nKirkus Reviews Best Fiction 2017 - Viet Thanh Nguyen<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Refugees was featured in\u00a0Kirkus Reviews Best Fiction of 2017.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/vietnguyen.info\/2017\/4718\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Viet\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"2 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/vietnguyen.info\/2017\/4718\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/vietnguyen.info\/2017\/4718\",\"name\":\"Kirkus Reviews Best Fiction 2017 - 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