Viet Thanh Nguyen

Today we conclude our series Rich Country/Poor Country by taking a second look at all three novels, The Disaster Tourist, The Sympathizer, and Paradise. We'll take a closer look at how forcefully these authors present their political views, the differences between state and corporate power in these novels, and James will get really angry when Viet Thanh Nguyen doubts the value of creative writing workshops. For our series on Rich Country | Poor Country, we will read and discuss three novels: Yun Ko-eun's The Disaster Tourist Jun 3 - 17, Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Sympathizer Jun 24 - Jul 8, and Abdulrazak Gurnah's Paradise Jul 15-29. You can join discussion here: https://www.reddit.com/r/CanonicalPod where you can also find show notes, credits and extended discussions for every episode. You can support us by rating/liking/sharing our podcast! Subscribe to us here: Apple | Stitcher | Spotify | Google | Youtube You can also support us by buying a  book from one of our curated lists:  https://bookshop.org/shop/CanonicalPod. We earn a commission on every purchase and your local indie bookstore gets a cut too! We are also on Twitter and Facebook @CanonicalPod. Follow us to get updates on upcoming episodes!

We're wrapping up our look at Viet Thanh Nguyen's Pulitzer prize winning novel The Sympathizer with an analysis of the racial and political implications of the novel. Nguyen is pretty outspoken about how race might influence the way a reader reacts to communism, and also how minority and majority writers address an audience. So who is Nguyen trying to speak to? Tune in to find out. For our series on Rich Country | Poor Country, we will read and discuss three novels: Yun Ko-eun's The Disaster Tourist Jun 3 - 17, Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Sympathizer Jun 24 - Jul 8, and Abdulrazak Gurnah's Paradise. You can join our Reddit discussion here: https://www.reddit.com/r/CanonicalPod where you can also find show notes, credits and extended discussions for every episode. You can support us by rating/liking/sharing our podcast! Subscribe to us here: Apple | Stitcher | Spotify | Google | Youtube We are also on Twitter and Facebook @CanonicalPod. Follow us to get updates on upcoming episodes!

Our apologies as illness delayed the release of this episode.  This week we are reviewing a book that was hailed by some as one of the most important books of the decade-- and perhaps the century?  While we agreed The Sympathizer was a good read, opinions differed on whether or not it was great.  We also debated how important a novel voice is to the success of novel. For our series on Rich Country | Poor Country, we will read and discuss three novels: Yun Ko-eun's The Disaster Tourist Jun 3 - 17, Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Sympathizer Jun 24 - Jul 8, and Abdulrazak Gurnah's Paradise Jul 15-29. You can join our Reddit discussion here: https://www.reddit.com/r/CanonicalPod where you can also find show notes, credits and extended discussions for every episode. You can support us by rating/liking/sharing our podcast! Subscribe to us here: Apple | Stitcher | Spotify | Google | Youtube We are also on Twitter and Facebook @CanonicalPod. Follow us to get updates on upcoming episodes!

As long as he can remember, author Viet Thanh Nguyen has been interested in how stories about his home country of Vietnam are told in America. In his own works, including the Pulitzer-winning novel "The Sympathizer," he centers on the voices of refugees like himself. He offers his Brief But Spectacular take on writing and memory. PBS NewsHour is supported by - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/about/funders

Viet Thanh Nguyen is a Vietnamese-American novelist. He is the Aerol Arnold Chair of English and Professor of English and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California.Nguyen's debut novel, The Sympathizer, won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and many other accolades. He was awarded a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2017.Nguyen is a regular contributor, op-ed columnist for The New York Times, covering immigration, refugees, politics, culture and SouthEast Asia. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/the-vietnamese-with-kenneth-nguyen/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Viet Thanh Nguyen's novel The Committed follows the same unnamed character we met in his Pulitzer-winning thriller, The Sympathizer. The character is now in Paris; having become disillusioned with the revolution he was a part of when we last saw him, he hasn't given up on the idea entirely. Nguyen told NPR's Scott Simon the book is also about colonization: He "wanted it to be set in a Paris that was not the tourist Paris or the romantic Paris. [It's] a novel about French ideas and French Revolution and French colonialism, but it's also a crime thriller set in these immigrant neighborhoods."

“…Cynical as he is of the world that he encounters, he's also pretty cynical and critical of himself. And that manifests itself in that sense of humor that you're talking about not a light-hearted sense of humor, but a very cynical and dark sense of humor, a sense of the absurd.” Viet Thanh Nguyen, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sympathizer and The Committed (now out in paperback), among other books, joins us on the show to riff on the return of his unnamed narrator, why he followed his prize-winning spy thriller with a crime novel set in 1980s Paris, how his novels are in conversation with Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, the American canon, his literary inspirations and much more with Poured Over’s host, Miwa Messer. Featured Books: Native Speaker by Chang-rae Lee American Spy by Lauren Wilkerson The Spy Who Came in From the Cold by John Le Carré The Land at the End of the World by António Lobo Antunes Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison The Quiet American by Graham Greene Poured Over is produced and hosted by Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang. Follow us her for new episodes Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional bonus episodes on Saturdays.) A full transcript of the show is available here.

The Committed is Viet Thanh Nguyen‘s keenly awaited follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Sympathizer. A journey through the underworld of 1980s Paris, it shares the same narrator, a Vietnamese-French communist spy, as its predecessor and has drawn praise as ‘a treatise of global futurity in the aftermath of colonial conquest’ (Ocean Vuong) and ‘a deep, compelling and humorous portrait of how we are shaped by fictions others have for us’ (Laila Lalami). He speaks with Leah Jing McIntosh about a literary thriller spiked with absurdist humour that shines a forensic light on empire and capitalism. Recorded for MWF in 2021.Support MWF: https://mwf.com.au/donate/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

My guest for this episode is Trinh Q. Truong. Trinh came to the U.S. from Vietnam with her mother about 20 years ago. During what we in the U.S. refer to as the Vietnam War, Trinh’s grandfather worked for the governments of the Republic of Vietnam and the United States doing intelligence work, mainly mapping the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Most of the rest of her family was engaged during the war years in democratic activism in the country.  After Saigon fell in 1975, Trinh’s grandparents and eight of their children—with the exception of Trinh’s mother, who was one year old—were sent to reeducation labor camps for nine years to atone for their wartime allegiances. Trinh herself is a longtime refugee activist in the U.S. and a recent graduate of Oxford in England with a masters degree in refugee and forced migration studies.When I met Trinh last summer, we had, what to me, is an inevitable discussion of books. As I was intrigued by her background, I asked Trinh if there was a book she might like to discuss with me on the podcast. Trinh said that she had started reading The Sympathizer, by Viet Thanh Nguyen several times, and that she would get through it this fall and then talk with me.The Sympathizer is a beautifully written, dark and tragic novel set during and after the war in Vietnam. The unnamed narrator is a Western-educated Vietnamese. While he is working for the CIA in Saigon and serving as aide-de-camp to a South Vietnamese general, he is also a spy for the North, secretly sending intelligence to the insurgents, and his spying continues as he joins Vietnamese refugees in America after the war. Adding to the difficulties for our narrator, his boyhood friends are soldiers fighting for the South. The narrator is torn apart by his conflicting sympathies. Now, sometime in the late 1970s, the narrator is in a communist prison, addressing an interrogator who demands that he explain his activities among the enemy.  The book is ultimately an indictment of the French, the Americans and the Vietnamese themselves. More on TrinhFrom Vietnam to Utica and back again: Reflecting on my refugee journey Trinh Truong

This week we speak with Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sympathizer and USC professor Viet Thanh Nguyen. It’s a great conversation and we hope you enjoy it as much as we did taking part in it.We also have ‘Choice Words’ about Deion Sanders’s big splash and securing a massive victory against the college football powers that be in recruiting. Don’t miss another great edition of Jake’s Takes as well. All this and more on this week’s show! ZirinJackson State's Deion Sanders snagging top recruit makes HBCU football the big storySubscribe to The Nation to support all of our podcasts: thenation.com/podcastsubscribe.—http://www.edgeofsportspodcast.com/ | http://twitter.com/EdgeOfSportsPod | http://fb.com/edgeofsportspod | email us: edgeofsports@gmail.com | Edge of Sports hotline: 401-426-3343 (EDGE)—Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy