Viet Thanh Nguyen

1 week ago | kansascity.com | Viet Thanh Nguyen

"These [essays], carried out as both criticism and autobiography, are my attempt to think through what it means to write and read from the position of an other, which is for me the starting point of an ethical and political art." That's Viet Thanh Nguyen, writing in his latest collection, "To Save and to Destroy: Writing as an Other." The book originated as six lectures that the Pulitzer Prize winner gave for the prestigious Charles Eliot Norton Lectures series at Harvard University in 2023...

1 week ago | zeteo.com | Viet Thanh Nguyen

Many Americans feel that Donald Trump is betraying the country by destroying cherished American principles, while many American allies likewise feel betrayed by Trump’s abandonment of long-term loyalties. As a refugee from Vietnam, where the United States arguably let down its South Vietnamese allies, I do not think that the fickleness of American loyalty, or the consistency of American inconsistency when it comes to principles, is itself a surprise.

1 week ago | euro2day.gr | Viet Thanh Nguyen

«Μαζική απέλαση τώρα». Αυτό ήταν το σλόγκαν σε πολλά πλακάτ σε συγκεντρώσεις που πραγματοποιούνταν κατά τη διάρκεια της εκλογικής κούρσας για την ανάδειξη του προεδρικού υποψήφιου των Ρεπουμπλικανών και πλέον εκλεγμένου προέδρου Donald Trump.

1 week ago | lithub.com | Viet Thanh Nguyen

One way to understand the dilemma of contemporary American literature in the age of Donald Trump is to see it as an imperial literature. The United States is a different kind of empire, exerting global hegemonic power through hundreds of military bases and a network of alliances, trade agreements, and financial and legal institutions, which add up to a US-led “international rules based order,” as Joe Biden called it.

2 weeks ago | lithub.com | Viet Thanh Nguyen

Now we come to an end, with so many things I have not yet touched on when it comes to salvation and destruction, on writing as an other and writing about otherness. Over the course of these lectures, I have aged, and with this year, as with every passing year, I cannot help but hear the distant rumble of “Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near.” My beloved, beautiful four-year-old daughter heralded this chariot, not long ago.