Latest / New Books in Literature
Viet Thanh Nguyen, "The Committed" (Grove Press, 2021)
What do you ask a novelist who has won a Pulitzer, a Guggenheim, and a MacArthur genius grant? Cocktail advice, of course. When I had the honor of chatting with Viet Thanh Nguyen about his two novels The Sympathizer and The Committed, we started by discussing what beverages would go well with his books. While the first book is a spy novel and the second is a noir mafia story, they both use the same hard-drinking narrator to explore issues of race and racism, colonialism and decolonization, and violence and non-violence. Set in Southern California in the 1970s and Paris, France in the 1980s…
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