Viet Thanh Nguyen
Inprint, Houston’s premier literary arts nonprofit organization, presents a live virtual event with MacArthur Fellow and Pulitzer Prize winner Viet Thanh Nguyen on Monday, April 12, 7 pm CT as part of the 40th anniversary 2020/2021 Inprint Margarett Root Brown Reading Series. Nguyen will read an excerpt from his new novel The Committed, a sequel to The Sympathizer, and then converse with Houston author and Inprint Advisory Board member Sarah Choi. The event will take place via the Inprint “virtual studio.” General admission tickets are $5 and now on sale through the Inprint website. Brazos Bookstore offers discounted books are available for purchase. For more information, visit Inprint’s website at www.inprinthouston.org or call 713.521.2026.
Viet Thanh Nguyen, whose family came to the U.S. as refugees during the Vietnam War in 1975, wrote his debut novel The Sympathizer, which depicts the war from a Vietnamese perspective because of the lack of representation he noticed.
According to The New York Times, Nguyen’s debut – which won the Pulitzer Prize, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, an Edgar Award for Best First Novel from the Mystery Writers of America, the First Novel Prize from the Center for Fiction, a Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction from the American Library Association, le Prix du meilleur livre étranger (Best Foreign Book in France), and the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature – “fills a void… giving voice to the previously voiceless while it compels the rest of us to look at the events of 40 years ago in a new light.” He is also the author of the story collection The Refugees, the children’s book Chicken of the Sea, and two nonfiction works including Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War.
Nguyen joins us to read from and talk about his new novel, The Committed, a sequel to The Sympathizer, set in 1980s Paris, which Laila Lalami calls “a rich and exhilarating story of friendship, loyalty, and greed.” Ocean Vuong adds, “Fierce in tone, capacious, witty, sharp, and deeply researched, The Committed marks, not just a sequel to its groundbreaking predecessor, but a sum total accumulation of a life devoted to Vietnamese American history and scholarship.” MacArthur Fellow, Nguyen teaches at the University of Southern California and works as a cultural critic-at-large for The Los Angeles Times.
The Inprint Margarett Root Brown Reading Series, now in its 40th anniversary season, is presented by Inprint, a Houston-based nonprofit literary arts organization dedicated to inspiring readers and writers. The series is made possible by generous underwriting support from The Brown Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Inprint receives support from The Jerry C. Dearing Family Foundation, Houston Endowment, The City of Houston through the Houston Arts Alliance, and the Texas Commission on the Arts. The series is presented in association with Brazos Bookstore and the University of Houston Creative Writing Program.