Refugees (Nguyen) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
Short stories are strange things: somber, intense, and abrupt—they lack the luxurious pacing of a novel, the sense of life unfolding over the span of 400 or 800 pages. In a story everything is compressed, every word matters, and every action reaches for metaphorical standing. It practically cries out "proceed with care!"  READ MORE.
Molly Lundquist - LitLovers



Fiction supposedly "gives voice" to its characters, but what can it do for those who would rather not speak? In Viet Thanh Nguyen's superb new collection, The Refugees, men and women displaced from wartime Saigon and resettled in California don't say much about the journey, having practiced many versions of silence—from state censorship to language barriers—along the way. To illustrate their plight, Nguyen homes in on their bodies rather than their words, so that a more accurate description of what the book does is "give flesh" to characters at risk of fading from memory, sometimes their own…If at times I found myself missing the playful, voice-driven punch of The Sympathizer, it's a tribute to Nguyen's range that these eight stories cast a quieter, but no less devastating, spell. 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.
Mia Alvar - New York Times Book Review


[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 (UK)


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)


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


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


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 dynamicsv.… 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


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


A beautiful collection that deftly illustrates the experiences of the kinds of people our country has, until recently, welcomed with open arms (UK). 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


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 Magazine


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.
Oprah Magazine


(Starred review.) Each searing tale.…a pressure cooker of unease, simmering with unresolved issues of memory and identity.… Nguyen is not here to sympathize...but to challenge the experience of white America as the invisible norm.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review.) Refugees is a highly gratifying interlude.… Nguyen won't disappoint.… [H]ighly recommended. —Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC
Library Journal


(Starred review.) Each intimate, supple, and heartrending story is unique in its particulars even as all are works of piercing clarity, poignant emotional nuance, and searing insights into the trauma of war and the long chill of exile, the assault on identity and the resilience of the self, and the fragility and preciousness of memories.
Booklist


Nguyen's slice-of-life approach is precise without being clinical, archly humorous without being condescending, and full of understanding.… [His] stories, excellent from start to finish, transcend ethnic boundaries to speak to human universals.
Kirkus Reviews