Description
Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer
With the coruscating gaze that informed The Sympathizer, in The Refugees Viet Thanh Nguyen gives voice to lives led between two worlds, the adopted homeland and the country of birth. From a young Vietnamese refugee who suffers profound culture shock when he comes to live with two gay men in San Francisco, to a woman whose husband is suffering from dementia and starts to confuse her for a former lover, to a girl living in Ho Chi Minh City whose older half-sister comes back from America having seemingly accomplished everything she never will, the stories are a captivating testament to the dreams and hardships of immigration. The second piece of fiction by a major new voice in American letters, The Refugees is a beautifully written and sharply observed book about the aspirations of those who leave one country for another, and the relationships and desires for self-fulfillment that define our lives.
Praise for The Refugees:
An Amazon Best Book of the Month (Literature and Fiction)
A New York Times Editors’ Choice
An Indie Next Selection
A Newsday Best Book of the Year So Far
“Stories about people poised between their devastated homeland and their affluent adopted country . . . Viet Thanh Nguyen [is] one of our great chroniclers of displacement . . . beautiful and heartrending . . . Nguyen’s narrative style―restrained, spare, avoiding metaphor or the syntactical virtuosity on display in every paragraph of The Sympathizer―is well suited for portraying tentative states . . . all Nguyen’s fiction is pervaded by a shared intensity of vision, by stinging perceptions that drift like windblown ashes.”―Joyce Carol Oates, New Yorker
“These stories of Vietnamese refugees cast a lingering spell . . . [A] superb new collection . . . The collection’s subtle, attentive prose and straightforward narrative style perfectly suit the low-profile civilian lives it explores . . . With the volume turned down, we lean in more closely, listening beyond what the refugees say to step into their skins.”―New York Times Book Review
“A beautiful collection that deftly illustrates the experiences of the kinds of people our country has, until recently, welcomed with open arms . . . It’s hard not to feel for Nguyen’s characters . . . But Nguyen never asks the reader to pity them; he wants us only to see them as human beings. And because of his wonderful writing, it’s impossible not to do so. It’s an urgent, wonderful collection that proves that fiction can be more than mere storytelling―it can bear witness to the lives of people who we can’t afford to forget.”―NPR Books
“The Refugees is as impeccably written as it is timed . . . This is an important and incisive book written by a major writer with firsthand knowledge of the human rights drama exploding on the international stage―and the talent to give us inroads toward understanding it . . . It is refreshing and essential to have this work from a writer who knows and feels the terrain on an intellectual, emotional and cellular level―it shows . . . An exquisite book.”―Washington Post
“The Refugees arrives right on time . . . In The Refugees, such figures aren’t, contra Trump, an undifferentiated, threatening mass. They are complicatedly human and deserving our care and empathy . . . In our moment, to look faithfully and empathetically at the scars made by dislocation, to bear witness to the past pain and present vulnerability such scars speak of, is itself a political act. So, too, is Nguyen’s dedication: ‘For all refugees, everywhere.’”―Boston Globe
“Wistfulness threads through The Refugees like an anthem of displacement. The text is barbed with subtle humor that is wry and painful. The resulting stories are beautiful in their astringency and shifting points of view . . . Nguyen’s writing travels along a spine of moral reckoning . . . The collection casts a formidable spell, especially at this political moment . . . Very little is forgettable in these lapidary stories.”―Los Angeles Times
“Tragically good timing . . . A short-story collection mostly plumbing the experience of boat-bound Vietnamese who escaped to California . . . But there are others of different nationalities, alienated not from a nation but from love or home, and displaced in subtler ways . . . Ultimately, Nguyen enlarges empathy, the high ideal of literature and the enemy of hate and fear.”―New York
“The 2016 Pulitzer Prize winner returns with a beautifully crafted collection that explores the netherworld of Vietnamese refugees, whose lives and cultural dislocation he dissects with precision and grace.”―O, The Oprah Magazine
