The Refugees Paperback – January 2, 2018 by Viet Thanh Nguyen

Description

Author: Nguyen Viet Thanh

Brand: Grove Press

Edition: Reprint

Package Dimensions: 19x208x209

Number Of Pages: 224

Release Date: 02-01-2018

Details: Product Description
From the author of The Sympathizer, winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, The Refugees is the second piece of fiction from a powerful voice in American letters, praised as “beautiful and heartrending” (Joyce Carol Oates, New Yorker), “terrific” (Chicago Tribune), and “an important and incisive book” (Washington Post)

Published in hardcover to astounding acclaim, The Refugees is the remarkable debut collection of short stories by Viet Thanh Nguyen, winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novel The Sympathizer. In these powerful stories, written over a period of twenty years and set in both Vietnam and America, Nguyen paints a vivid portrait of the experiences of people leading lives between two worlds, the adopted homeland and the country of birth.

With the same incisiveness as in The Sympathizer, in The Refugees Viet Thanh Nguyen gives voice to the hopes and expectations of people making life-changing decisions to leave one country for another, and the rifts in identity, loyalties, romantic relationships, and family that accompany relocation. 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 migration.

The second work 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.
Review
Praise for The Refugees:
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year 2017Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR, San Francisco Chronicle, Esquire, BuzzFeed, Electric Literature, Chicago Public Library, National Post, Kirkus Reviews, BookPage, and GoodreadsAsian Pacific American Librarians Association Honor AwardFinalist for the California Book Awards (Fiction)Nominated for the Bookish Awards (Best Short Story Collection)Longlisted for the Aspen Words Literary PrizeNamed One of 100 Must-Read Contemporary Short Story Collections by Book RiotAn 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 . . . 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