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For Nguyen groupies desperate for future titles, Refugees is a highly gratifying interlude. For short fiction fans of other extraordinary, between-culture collections such as Daniyal Mueenuddin's In Other Rooms, Other Wonders and Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth, Nguyen won't disappoint. Either way, highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, 8/8/16.]
Viet Thanh Nguyen, the Pulitzer Prize– and Carnegie Medal–winning author of The Sympathizer, on the future of diverse literature—taking the “norm” out of our literary value system.
This thought-provoking book is recommended for all students of the Vietnam War and those interested in historical memory. For a work that focuses more exclusively on U.S. memory, see Patrick Hagopian's The Vietnam War in American Memory.
Ultimately a meditation on war, political movements, America's imperialist role, the CIA, torture, loyalty, and one's personal identity, this is a powerful, thought-provoking work. It's hard to believe this effort, one of the best recent novels to cover the Vietnamese conflict from an Asian perspective, is a debut. This is right up there with Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke. [See Prepub Alert, 10/27/14.]