Description

By (author) Nguyen Viet Thanh

Short /annotation:
Pulitzer Prize winner Viet Thanh Nguyen’s To Save and to Destroy is a deeply personal reflection on outsiders in literature and in US society. Across six essays, first delivered as the Norton Lectures, Nguyen offers insightful readings of authors who shaped his craft, culminating in a poignant and vigorous call for a solidarity of the devastated.

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From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Sympathizer (now an HBO series) comes a moving and unflinchingly personal meditation on the literary forms of otherness and a bold call for expansive political solidarity.

Born in war-ravaged Vietnam, Viet Nguyen arrived in the United States as a child refugee in 1975. The Nguyen family would soon move to San Jose, California, where the author grew up, attending UC Berkeley in the aftermath of the shocking murder of Vincent Chin, which shaped the political sensibilities of a new generation of Asian Americans.

The essays here, delivered originally as the prestigious Norton Lectures, proffer a new answer to a classic literary question: What does the outsider mean to literary writing? Over the course of six captivating and moving chapters, Nguyen explores the idea of being an outsider through lenses that are, by turns, literary, historical, political, and familial.

Each piece moves between writers who influenced Nguyen’s craft and weaves in the haunting story of his late mother’s mental illness. Nguyen unfolds the novels and nonfiction of Herman Melville, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ralph Ellison, William Carlos Williams, and Maxine Hong Kingston, until aesthetic theories give way to pressing concerns raised by war and politics. What is a writer’s responsibility in a time of violence? Should we celebrate fiction that gives voice to the voiceless—or do we confront the forces that render millions voiceless in the first place? What are the burdens and pleasures of the “minor” writer in any society? Unsatisfied with the modest inclusion accorded to “model minorities” such as Asian Americans, Nguyen sets the agenda for a more radical and disquieting solidarity with those whose lives have been devastated by imperialism and forever wars.

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A series of emotional tales that makes palpable [Nguyen’s] intellectual understanding of an artist’s role in the political discourse and the way politics works its way into art.

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An essential addition for collections about the process and theory of writing, authors of diverse backgrounds, and particularly the experiences of Asian Americans, immigrants, and refugees in the United States.

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One of contemporary American fiction’s most fearless writers of conscience…explores the idea of the outsider in literature.

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Nguyen explores works of literature that he has found most useful and inspirational in helping him define his worldview, his political and literary aesthetics.

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Profound…Nguyen explores the idea of being an outsider through literary, historical, political, and familial lenses…while addressing concerns about the writer’s responsibility in a time of violence and the burdens and pleasures of the “minor” writer in society.

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A meditation on what it means to be “the other,” both in establishing necessary distance, as well as being cast aside by stigma and outside perceptions… Nguyen invites his audience to seriously consider the pitfalls and promises of writing as an other.

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Seamlessly weaves together personal reflections and literary analysis…thought-provoking and cogently argued.

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A provocative exploration of the writer as storyteller, anthropologist, and knowing outsider.

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A profound explora