The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives

(Hardback)

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Description

In January 2017, Donald Trump signed an executive order stopping entry to the United States from seven predominantly Muslim countries and dramatically cutting the number of refugees allowed to resettle in the United States each year. The American people spoke up, with protests, marches, donations, and lawsuits that quickly overturned the order. But the refugee caps remained.

In The Displaced, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Viet Thanh Nguyen, himself a refugee, brings together a host of prominent refugee writers to explore and illuminate the refugee experience. Featuring original essays by a collection of writers from around the world, The Displaced is an indictment of closing our doors, and a powerful look at what it means to be forced to leave home and find a place of refuge.

Reviews

One of the Ten Best Books of the Year * Minneapolis Star-Tribune *
"The book is being published at a time when discourse around refugees has shifted distressingly in the Trump era, with new caps on refugee settlement being instituted and immigration bans remaining clear policy positions. * Entertainment Weekly *
In this collection of 17 essays (one consisting of cartoons) by writers who were forced to leave their homes, Viet Thanh Nguyen, a Pulitzer-winning novelist and himself a Vietnamese refugee to America, begins to assemble one. In so doing he gives ordinary Westerners a heart-wrenching insight into the uprooted lives led in their midstthe collection succeeds in demonstrating that this dispersed community in some ways resembles other nations. It has its founding myths, but its citizens all have their own tragedies, victories and painand each has a story to tell. * The Economist *
an incisive and heartbreaking exploration of the refugee crisis * Bustle *
With more than a dozen essays on refugees from writers throughout the world, the collection edited by Nguyen attempts a vital task: to give voice to the oft-silenced and to redirect the current stream of anti-refugee rhetoric and sentiment in a more just and humanizing direction. The end result is an accessible and engaging dialogue that mines memories, many of them traumatic, and delivers on its global message of displacement and loss... it goes without saying that Nguyens collection, with its unapologetic repositioning of the refugee front and center, couldnt have arrived at a more critical time. * The Minneapolis Star Tribune *
Together, the stories share similar threads of loss and adjustment, of the confusion of identity, of wounds that heal and those that dont, of the scars that remain. * The San Francisco Chronicle *
This heartrending, thought-provoking collection of essays humanizes the refugee experience, describing harrowing escapes, economically driven evacuations, and wartime disasters. * School Library Journal *
Powerful and deeply moving personal stories about the physical and emotional toll one endures when forced out of ones homeland. * PBS Online *
Poignant and timely, these essays ask us to live with our eyes wide open during a time of geo-political crisis. Also, 10% of the cover price of the book will be donated annually to the International Rescue Committee, so I hope readers will help support this book and the vast range of voices that fill its pages. * Electric Literature *
Nguyen and 17 other writers share their own experiences with displacement and immigration, and their stories remind us why every culture needs newcomers. * The Week *
This heartbreaking collection of essays humanizes the refugee experience" * Library Journal *
Each essay is worthwhile. * Literary Hub *
In a decade characterized by massive global displacement that seems likely to grow worse, this collection is both a reminder of the lives altered or destroyed by geopolitical happenings, and a gesture of aid. * The Millions *
The essays are consistently both eloquent and riveting. * World Literature Today *

Author Bio

Viet Thanh Nguyen was born in Vietnam in 1971. After the fall of Saigon in 1975, he and his family fled to the United States. The author of three books, Nguyen is the Aerol Arnold Chair of English and professor of English and American studies and ethnicity at University of Southern California. He lives in Los Angeles.