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Viet Thanh Nguyen

Biography

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Viet Thanh Nguyen was born in Vietnam and raised in America. He is the author of THE COMMITTED, which continues the story of THE SYMPATHIZER, awarded the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, alongside seven other prizes. He is also the author of the short story collection THE REFUGEES; the nonfiction book NOTHING EVER DIES, a finalist for the National Book Award; and is the editor of an anthology of refugee writing, THE DISPLACED. He is the Aerol Arnold Professor of English and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California and a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur foundations. He lives in Los Angeles.

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Books by Viet Thanh Nguyen

by Viet Thanh Nguyen - Memoir, Nonfiction

With insight, humor, formal invention and lyricism, Viet Thanh Nguyen rewinds the film of his own life. He expands the genre of personal memoir by acknowledging larger stories of refugeehood, colonization, and ideas about Vietnam and America, writing with his trademark sardonic wit and incisive analysis, as well as a deep emotional openness about his life as a father and a son. A MAN OF TWO FACES explores the necessity of both forgetting and of memory, the promises America so readily makes and breaks, and the exceptional life story of one of the most original and important writers working today.

by Viet Thanh Nguyen - Fiction, Literary Fiction, Suspense, Thriller

THE COMMITTED follows the man of two minds as he arrives in Paris in the early 1980s with his blood brother, Bon. The pair try to overcome their pasts and ensure their futures by engaging in capitalism in one of its purest forms: drug dealing. Traumatized by his reeducation at the hands of his former best friend, Man, and struggling to assimilate into French culture, the Sympathizer finds Paris both seductive and disturbing. As he falls in with a group of left-wing intellectuals whom he meets at dinner parties given by his French Vietnamese “aunt,” he finds stimulation for his mind but also customers for his narcotic merchandise. But the new life he is making has perils he has not foreseen, and he will need all his wits, resourcefulness and moral flexibility if he is to prevail.

by Viet Thanh Nguyen - Fiction, Short Stories

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, these stories are a captivating testament to the dreams and hardships of immigration.

by Viet Thanh Nguyen - Fiction, Historical Fiction

It is April 1975, and Saigon is in chaos. At his villa, a general of the South Vietnamese army is drinking whiskey and, with the help of his trusted captain, drawing up a list of those who will be given passage aboard the last flights out of the country. The general and his compatriots start a new life in Los Angeles, unaware that one among their number, the captain, is secretly observing and reporting on the group to a higher-up in the Viet Cong.