The Refugees

Praise for The Refugees: A New York Times Notable Book of the Year 2017 Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR, San Francisco Chronicle, Esquire, BuzzFeed, Electric Literature, Chicago Public Library, National Post, Kirkus Reviews, BookPage, and Goodreads Asian Pacific American Librarians Association Honor Award Finalist for the California Book Awards (Fiction) Nominated for the Bookish Awards (Best Short Story Collection) Longlisted for the Aspen Words Literary Prize Named One of 100 Must-Read Contemporary Short Story Collections by Book Riot An Indie Next Selection 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 . . . Nguyens narrative stylerestrained, spare, avoiding metaphor or the syntactical virtuosity on display in every paragraph of The Sympathizeris well suited for portraying tentative states . . . all Nguyens 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 collections 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 . . . Its hard not to feel for Nguyens 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, its impossible not to do so. Its an urgent, wonderful collection that proves that fiction can be more than mere storytellingit can bear witness to the lives of people who we cant 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 stageand 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 levelit shows . . . An exquisite book. Washington Post The Refugees arrives right on time . . . In The Refugees, such figures arent, 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 Nguyens 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 . . . Nguyens 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 re

Viet Thanh Nguyen was born in Vietnam and raised in America. He is the author of The Sympathizer, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Fiction, the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, the Edgar Award for First Novel, the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, the California Book Award for First Fiction, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He is also the author of the nonfiction books Nothing Ever Dies, a finalist for the National Book Award, and Race and Resistance. The Aerol Arnold Professor of English and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California, he lives in Los Angeles.