The Refugees with Viet Thanh Nguyen

The 2016 Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Sympathizer visits Changing Hands Phoenix with his new short story collection The Refugees, a captivating testament to the dreams and hardships of immigration on Thursday, April 20th, 2017 at 7 pm. Co-presented by the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing. Seating for this event is first-come, first-serve. This event is open to the public and free.

Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Sympathizer was one of the most widely and highly praised novels of 2015, the winner not only of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, but also the Center for Fiction Debut Novel Prize, the Edgar Award for Best First Novel, the ALA Carnegie Medal for Fiction, the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, and the California Book Award for First Fiction. Nguyen's next fiction book, The Refugees, is a collection of perfectly formed stories written over a period of twenty years, exploring questions of immigration, identity, love, and family.

With the coruscating gaze that informed The Sympathizer, 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, the stories are a captivating testament to the dreams and hardships of immigration. The second piece 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.

About Viet Thanh Nguyen
Viet Thanh Nguyen's novel The Sympathizer is a New York Times best seller and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Other honors include the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the Edgar Award for Best First Novel from the Mystery Writers of America, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction from the American Library Association, the First Novel Prize from the Center for Fiction, a Gold Medal in First Fiction from the California Book Awards, and the Asian/Pacific American Literature Award from the Asian/Pacific American Librarian Association. His other books are Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (a finalist for the National Book Award in nonfiction) and Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America. He is the Aerol Arnold Chair of English and Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California.

About the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing

Established in 2003, The Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing is a non-academic unit at Arizona State University that serves as the artistic and intellectual heart of a vibrant, multinational, and diverse community of writers, dedicated to serving the public through exceptional literary programs and resources. For more information, visit our website at http://piper.asu.edu.

About Changing Hands

Arizona's legendary Changing Hands Bookstore. Independent books for independent minds since 1974. Phoenix & Tempe. changinghands.com