Description
About the Author
Viet Thanh Nguyen was born in Vietnam in 1971. After the fall of Saigon in 1975 he and his family fled to the United States as refugees. Nguyen's 2015 novel The Sympathizer won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction from the ALA, the Edgar Award for Best First Novel, the California Book Award for First Fiction, and the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature. In addition, The Sympathizer was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, among others. Nguyen is the Aerol Arnold Chair of English and Professor of English and American Studies and Ethnicity at USC. His 2016 collection of critical essays, Nothing Ever Dies, was a finalist for the National Book Award and is a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in General Nonfiction. His first collection of short stories, The Refugees, was published in 2017 and was an instant New York Times Bestseller. He lives in Los Angeles.
Reviews
"The stories are beautifully, and often angrily, told, and felt, and add up collectively to documentary proof of the possibilities - of empathy and humanity" The Observer
"In this collection of 17 essays (one consisting of cartoons) by writers who were forced to leave their homes, Viet Thanh Nguyen, a Pulitzer-winning novelist and himself a Vietnamese refugee to America, begins to assemble one. In so doing he gives ordinary Westerners a heart-wrenching insight into the uprooted lives led in their midst...the collection succeeds in demonstrating that this dispersed community in some ways resembles other nations. It has its founding myths, but its citizens all have their own tragedies, victories and pain-and each has a story to tell." The Economist
"In The Displaced, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Viet Thanh Nguyen, himself a refugee, brings together a host of prominent refugee writers to explore and illuminate the refugee experience. Featuring original essays by a collection of writers from around the world, The Displaced is an indictment of closing our doors, and a powerful look at what it means to be forced to leave home and find a place of refuge." The Guardian Bookshop
"At a time when empathy is at an all-time low for people seeking refuge from war, oppression and violence, this is is a key read." Stylist magazine
"Nguyen and 17 other writers share their own experiences with displacement and immigration, and their... stories remind us why every culture needs newcomers." The Week
"The world is full of people who left the place they were born just to stay alive. We hope this book finds its way into many hands and hearts, giving us a glimmer of empathy." San Francisco Chronicle
"...an incisive and heartbreaking exploration of the refugee crisis..." Bustle
"Each essay is worthwhile." - Lit Hub
"The essays are consistently both eloquent and riveting." World Literature Today
"Together, the stories share similar threads of loss and adjustment, of the confusion of identity, of wounds that heal and those that don't, of the scars that remain." The San Francisco Chronicle
"In a decade characterized by massive global displacement that seems likely to grow worse, this collection is both a reminder of the lives altered or destroyed by geopolitical happenings, and a gesture of aid." - The Millions
"Poignant and timely, these essays ask us to live with our eyes wide open during a time of geo-political crisis." Electric Literature
Book Information
ISBN 9781419729485
Author Viet Nguyen
Format Hardback
Page Count 192
Imprint Abrams Press
Publisher Abrams