The Refugees

(Hardback, Large Print Edition)

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Viet Thanh Nguyen's debut The Sympathizer won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and became one of the most acclaimed novels of recent years, its author recognized as an important contemporary writer and thinker. His beautiful and deeply moving new book, The Refugees, is a collection of perfectly formed stories written over a period of twenty years. In these powerful stories set in both Vietnam and America, Nguyen paints a vivid portrait of the experience 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.

Reviews

Praise for The Refugees
An Amazon Best Book of the Month (Literature and Fiction)
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 . . . 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 incisive book written by a major writer with firsthand knowledge of the human rights drama exploding on the international stage--and 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 level--it shows . . . An exquisite book."--Washington Post
"The Refugees arrives right on time . . . In The Refugees, such figures aren't, 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 Nguyen's dedication: 'For all refugees, everywhere.'"--Boston Globe
"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 returns with a beautifully crafted collection that explores the netherworld of Vietnamese refugees, whose lives and cultural dislocation he dissects with precision and grace."--O, The Oprah Magazine
"The Refugees showcases the same astute and penetrating intelligence that characterized [Nguyen's] Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Sympathizer . . . Nguyen is an expert on prickly family dynamics . . . He can also be a sly humorist . . . The Refugees confirms Nguyen as an agile, trenchant writer, able to inhabit a number of contrary points of view. And it whets your appetite for his next novel."--Seattle Times
"A terrific new book of short stories . . . Nguyen is an exceptional storyteller who packs an enormous amount of information and images into a short work . . . Nguyen's vision of the Vietnamese migration to the United States and its impact on the nation is complex. His message is not Pollyannaish or demonizing . . . Nguyen's message, instead, is that they are people, like all of us, with complicated lives and histories. "--Chicago Tribune
"[A] timely story collection . . . As our first major Vietnamese-American writer, Nguyen is a prodigious genius making up for lost time."--Newsday
"At a time when paranoia about refugees and migrants has reached a new high in America and perhaps the world, Viet Thanh Nguyen's first collection of short stories, The Refugees, adds a necessary voice humanizing this group of demonized people . . . These eight works celebrate the art of telling stories as an act of resilience and survival . . . A beautifully written collection, filled with empathy and insight into the lives of people who have too often been erased from the larger American media landscape."--Dallas Morning News
"The Refugees is the book we need now . . . [Nguyen's] new short story collection demonstrates the richness of the refugee experience--and highlights its singular traumas . . . The most timely short story collection in recent memory . . . The stories in The Refugees [are] haunting and heart-wrenching, but also wry and unapologetic in their humanity . . . Throughout, Nguyen demonstrates the richness of the refugee experience, while also foregrounding the very real trauma that lies at its core."--BuzzFeed
"With masterful economy and ease, the Pulitzer Prize-winner subverts our expectations of the refugee experience . . . [An] extraordinary collection . . . Despite the many accolades heaped upon Nguyen . . . it still comes as a revelation just how beguiling these stories are. Sharp, sardonic, poignant and profoundly human . . . The true power of this collection lies in the way Nguyen subverts stereo-typical notions of the refugee experience, both sharpening and stretching our appreciation of its vast, universal dimensions in stories that range across generations, gender and time . . . Nguyen also possesses an extraordinary ability to evoke the everyday, the quotidian details of ordinary lives in vivid, direct prose."--South China Morning Post
"The Refugees will haunt its readers, especially in these times, when refugee stories need to be told, shared, and told again, ad infinitum."--A.V. Club
"Nguyen's stories deal with ghosts and patriotism, mental illness and infidelity, and gender roles and homosexuality, among other topics that highlight the tensions and complexities involved in the refugees' search for identity and belonging. The stories humanize Vietnamese-Americans who do not always fit the inflexible 'model minority' stereotype. They take a segment of the American population not always on the social radar and bring it into sharp relief."--America Magazine
"In the US, two kinds of stories typically exist about Vietnam and its people: jungles and napalm, or protest and politics. A new collection of short stories by Viet Thanh Nguyen will change that . . . Nguyen . . . is an expert on the implications of displacement . . . A worthy reminder that refugees are children, mothers, and fathers--not just casualties."--Quartz
"[An] accomplished collection . . . With anger but not despair, with reconciliation but not unrealistic hope, and with genuine humour that is not used to diminish anyone, Nguyen has breathed life into many unforgettable characters, and given us a timely book focusing, in the words of Willa Cather, on 'the slow working out of fate in people of allied sentiment and allied blood.'"--Guardian
"With President Trump's recent attempt to ban refugees from entering America, the quiet but impressively moving tales dissecting the Vietnamese experience in California in Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Refugees are a powerful antidote to all the fear mongering and lies out there . . . A rich exploration of human identity, family ties and love and loss, never has a short story collection been timelier."--Independent (UK)
"This stunning collection of stories affirms the brilliance of Nguyen . . . A collection of exceptional stories that ring with topicality and truth . . . The opening story, 'Black-Eyed Women' . . . is a superbly orchestrated piece of writing, with many movements and depths, moving across generations . . . The Refugees is a book that needs to be read: it is astonishingly good."--RTE Guide (Ireland)
"The eight stories that make up this brief volume are a delight . . . The short story is a beautiful affirmation of the supreme importance of art in our daily lives. And Viet Thanh Nguyen drives that point home brilliantly."--Mekong Review
"A collection of short stories that span [Nguyen's] 20-year struggle to earn the title of 'writer.'"--Mother Jones
"At a time when the American federal government is questioning more than ever the value of refugees' lives, this book is not only a moving read--it's utterly necessary."--Literary Hub
"Viet Thanh Nguyen writes funny . . . But what also makes him such a notable writer is how he can oscillate from comedy to tragedy . . . Viet's stories succeed."--Electric Literature
"A remarkable work of fiction."--Bustle (15 of 2017's Most Anticipated Fiction Books)
"Both a timely work of fiction and an artistic retrospective of a community's voyage over the decades."--National Post (Buzz-worthy Books for February)
"Nguyen's brilliant new work of fiction offers vivid and intimate portrayals of characters and explores identity, war, and loss in stories collected over a period of two decades."--Mil

Author Bio

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, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. 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.