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A collection of stories with a unique view of the immigrant experience, captured in unexpected ways. I really enjoyed how these stories continually surprised me with their unconventionality. I look forward to reading more by Viet Thanh Nguyen in the future.

This book was provided to me by NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

This book of exquisite short stories is a collection of varied characters and themes. The stories are moving, sad, haunting, enlightening, and memorable. The writer's wonderful skill at writing brings the stories to life with detailed descriptions and realistic characters.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book!

Viet Thanh Nguyen is a wonderful storyteller, bringing together both the hardships and opportunities faced by the refugee Vietnamese community. The stories are a complex mix of perspectives highlighting the difficulties of trying to balance identities. Only the theme seems to tie the stories together, which makes it slightly disjointed at times. And while I have read more emotive experiences, it still makes for an enjoyable read.

I was very fortunate to win a copy of Viet Thanh Nguyen's debut, Pulitzer-prize winning novel The Sympathizer last year and was quite impressed and so looked forward to reading his second book, a collection of eight short stories, with great anticipation. I was not disappointed. It takes considerable skills to fashion an interesting story with believable characters in just a few succinct pages and this author does it well.

The author dedicates his book 'For all refuges, everywhere.' And what a hot-button topic that is at the moment. But his is the Viet Nam experience of which he wrote so well in his first book.

"Black-Eyed Women" is something of a ghost story, tales repeated by ancient crones with black-eyes. "Aren't you afraid of ghosts?" "You aren't afraid of the things you believe in."

"The Other Man" In 1975, Liem, age 18, comes to San Francisco from Saigon through a resettlement agency and is taken in by a gay couple. "War wasn't just a tragedy but a farce."

"War Years" Continuing a thread begun in his earlier novel, Vietnamese business owners in America feel pressure to contribute money to raise a new army to defeat the Communists and win back their country.

"The Transplant" When a man receives a liver transplant, he tracks down the son of the donor--a man who deals in fake high-end goods.

"I Want You to Want Me" A woman whose husband is developing Alzheimers is upset when he continually calls her by another woman's name--a woman who seems to be the love of his life. My favorite story!

"The Americans" An aging couple take a trip to Vietnam to visit their daughter who is there teaching. The father is a black man who did a tour duty as a pilot during the war; the mother a Japanese woman he met while stationed in Okinawa. The daughter, being part black-part Japanese, tells her father, "I think I've found someplace where I can do some good and make up for some of the things you've done."

"Someone Else Besides You" Thomas, a thirty-three-year-old divorced man, working two jobs, takes in his elderly father. Thomas is still considered a 'boy' because he has never had children of his own. He is asked by his father's mistress to whom he's been rather snide, "Aren't there times you'd rather be someone else besides you?"

"Fatherland" A Vietnamese man has fathered two sets of children and named each set by the same names. The first set fled to America with their mother when Saigon fell and the father was sentenced to five years of imprisonment. She divorced him but once a year sends updates on how the children are doing--very successful, of course.
The father is now a guide for 'foreign tourists who only know one thing about this country...the war.'
His oldest daughter writes that she wants to come visit and her father is not surprised: 'I knew you would come back to see the one I named after you.' But can you love family you've never known?' Another excellent story!

Thank you to the author, publisher and NetGalley for the opportunity to read an arc of this new book. I am looking forward to more delightful reading from this talented author.

I am struggling to put my feelings into words. I really liked this collection. It is inarguable that the author is extraordinarily talented; the stories have the pacing and tone of Jhumpa Lahiri's work, and she is one of the finest writers I can think of. Having said that... no one story stood out to me. I read them all, I liked what I read, I felt the feelings of empathy, wonder, sometimes sadness, sometimes amusement, I think I was intended to feel. But I can not think of one particular story, moment or passage that hit me as "the one". I am inelegantly expressing that this collection is so good that, rather than highs and lows, the reader is treated to a continuous stream of beautifully written words. I am midway through "The Sympathizer", enjoying it very much... and yet praise Mr. Nguyen's stories as more finely-tuned even than his award-winning novel.

I would like to thank NetGalley and Grove Atlantic and Grove Press for an ARC of "The Refugees" by Viet Thanh Nguyen for my honest review. The genre of this novel is fiction, possibly historical fiction. This novel is composed of eight short stories written by the author. All the stories reflect Vietnamese life in American or in the homeland. I find that it is difficult to review a book with many stories. Some of the stories had no written conclusion or seemed to be open for interpretation. The author writes of family, love, immigration, homosexuals,mistresses, feelings of identity, and cultural differences. There also seems to be a feeling of pride that seems to be important. I found that the stories were interesting and the descriptions were graphic. I would recommend this book to those who enjoy reading short descriptive cultural stories.

Long-time readers will know I don't love short stories. I like my books long and complicated, the more description and backstory the better (hello, Charles Dickens!). Yet one cannot ignore the stellar short stories collections out this year. I started the year with Roxanne Gay's Difficult Women and moved into Viet Thanh Nguyen's collection of short stories. I am so glad I did.

Each one of Mr. Nguyen's short stories is a microcosm of what I love about reading. The characters are real and surprisingly well-developed in spite of the brevity of their stories. Their everyday lives are memorable in their mundanity. Their stories are equally unremarkable. Yet, they are captivating in their normalcy.

The Refugees is a collection of stories about the people who left behind their lives in a war-torn country to start fresh in a new one, sometimes at great peril, in a country that will provide them more freedoms than they ever could have had should they have stayed. These are the stories of people who represent just one more generation of people seeking refuge on our shores, who remind us all of the original settlers in this country.

Mr. Nguyen's ability to drive to the heart of each of their stories in a few short sentences embodies each word with significance. His prose makes the entire collection immensely readable. You find yourself drawn into each story, compelled to keep reading, and highly disappointed when it ends. Yet you move on to the next story to find yourself fully engaged once again.

The Refugees puts a human face onto the political hot potato that has become immigration and asylum in recent weeks. It is a reminder that refugees are not looking to infiltrate our country but just looking to escape their own. One cannot recommend this collection highly enough not only because of the storytelling but also because of the poignant reminders for empathy each story gives us.

At times intense, melancholy, anxiety inducing and beautiful, Nguyen's short story collection The Refugees is always interesting. It'd be difficult to have a more successful couple of years than he's had as a writer, and one of the continued benefits for readers is the release of earlier works. In these stories, the talent that has led to a Pulitzer is easy to see and to feel. And while I'm sure the timing of the collection's release isn't purely accidental, I'm not sure anyone could have known just how relevant such an offering would be.

This is a strong collection, my personal favorites being "Black Eyed Women" and "I'd Love You to Want Me". Nguyen's expression of humor through characters in bleak circumstances and situations, so darkly realized in The Sympathizers is less evident here and I suppose that I did miss that element to a small extent. This collection however is more haunting, these are tales that will be bouncing around in your brain long after you've read them, and because the stories span 20 years of his writing career, show readers the depth of Nguyen's experience.

While the topic of refugees could not be more relevant, The Refugees is not a collection strung together just to make a political point. This is good fiction featuring characters who, among other things are refugees. It would be well worth reading whether or not it was a hot button issue. Nevertheless, at a time when fear and loathing seem at the forefront of discussion as it concerns refugees, Nguyen's characters and stories are strong reminders that humanity shares the same general longings, desires and angsts and that, in the words of David Foster Wallace, "fiction's about what it is to be a...human being." Nguyen is one of America's finest writers and he knows a little something about what it means to be a refugee. His is a voice worth hearing and The Refugees is a fine place to start.

This is one of the best short story collections I have read. Viet Thanh Nguyen captures the refugee experience with all its hope and pathos. I was impressed with how skillfully he brings his characters to life. Some of us grew up watching nightly news reports about the war in Vietnam and the eventual exodus of thousands of refugees following the Communist takeover of South Vietnam. The “boat people” lucky to survive found their way to America and made new lives for their families.
Nguyen gives us moments in time in the lives of those who escaped but whose hearts would never leave their homeland. Here are some brief summaries of my favourites in the collection.

Black-Eyed Woman
A ghostwriter visited by the ghost of her dead brother, a brother who saved her life when she was only thirteen. A haunting story.

The Other Man
Experiences of a young man who escaped the communist takeover of Saigon in 1975 and ends up in San Francisco. Sponsored by Parrish Coyne and Marcus Chan. Parrish comments on how “pretty” Liem is. Liem finds a job working in a liquor store and when Parrish is away, he and Marcus explore each other. Liem receives a cryptic letter from his parents indicating how ‘re-educated” the family has become with the Communist takeover. Liem himself has had a re-education of his own.


War Years
Refugees running a grocery store with their son, trying to avoid paying money to a woman (Mrs. Hoa) raising money to fund a military to stop the Communists and return southern Vietnam to a democratic country. Extortion in all its forms..and the effects of the war on some of the refugees.


The Transplant
When a man receives an organ from a Vietnamese refugee, he ends up being taken advantage by an entrepreneur using his garage to stash his designer knock off goods.


I’d Love You to Want Me
An old professor, losing his mind begins to call his wife by another woman’s name, Yen, and describing places he has taken her which his wife has never been. Poignant and bittersweet.

The Americans
An African American Vietnam war veteran and his Japanese wife visit their daughter who is teaching English in Saigon. Claire has done everything in her life to counteract her B-52 bomber dad. A moving look at the ties that bind and how a daughter dedicates her life to making amends for her father.

Fatherland
A man with a mistress who, when the first family and his first wife flee Vietnam during the war, he ends up marrying said mistress and giving his next three children the same names as his first family. When Phuong’s sister comes from America to visit her father’s other family, she calls herself Vivien. Connections made between South Vietnam and the American South. Both fought and lost and paid the price by their conquerors. Phuong finds hope in her half sister as a way to escape her life in Vietnam. Vivien is not all she seems.

ARC received with thanks from Grove Press via NetGalley for review.

THE REFUGEES by Viet Thanh Nguyen is an extremely well-written collection of emotional stories which received starred reviews from Booklist, Kirkus, Library Journal, and Publishers Weekly. Although somewhat sophisticated for many of our high school readers, THE REFUGEES does explore themes of assimilation, family, identity, and loneliness. Viet Thanh Nguyen provides selections such as "Black-Eyed Women" which is a ghost story about losing a brother during the family's horrifying boat escape or "The Other Man" in which a gay couple invites a Vietnamese refugee into their home and he struggles with language and cultural differences.

As I prepared the review for this book, I was surprised to see the number of recently published books about refugees, particularly those intended for younger students. If you are searching for lesson plans about refugees, consider this one for high schoolers which also deals with media bias and was made available last week by the Choices Program at Brown University.

Viet Thanh Nguyen received numerous awards, including the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, for The Sympathizer which some of our students have used as a main text for Junior Theme. Enjoy THE REFUGEES, since as Nguyen says, "Stories are just things we fabricate, nothing more. We search for them in a word besides our own, then leave them here to be found, garments shed by ghosts."

Links live in the post:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/29/learning/lesson-plans/analyzing-trumps-immigration-ban-a-lesson-plan.html
http://choices.edu/resources/twtn/twtn-executive-order.php

While none of these stories matched the immensity of "The Sympathizer" every one did an excellent job capturing a moment or feeling which comes as no surprise with an author who has this kind of talent. A must read for anyone who enjoys short stories.

A solid 3.5

Wow, these stories are so relevant, especially with the current political climate in the world and specifically America. I love that Nyuyen brings to the forefront the stories of these individuals, yes it is "non-fiction" but in a real way, these stories represents what a lot of people went through and will go through.
Each story offers new insight into what is it like being an immigrant and the obstacles that they continually face.
An insightful, moving read.

Thanks

It can be difficult within the span of a short story to tell a complete story with fully formed characters but this collection of short stories does that, showcasing a series of snapshots of Vietnamese refugees who have settled in America. The stories concentrate on families, those torn apart by the war and those struggling to live between the past and the present. The writing is simple but powerful and sometimes poignant as in one story where a woman caring for her husband with dementia has to accept that he calls her by another woman’s name. For me “The Ghostwriter” was the most powerful story, where a woman who ghostwrites novels for people who have survived traumatic events meets and talks to the ghost of her own brother who died on the boat from Vietnam. The stories are often intense but never too gloomy or without hope and sometimes sprinkled with humour. They also remind us that being a refugee is not just about resettling in a new country with nothing but the clothes you are wearing but about assimilatating into a new culture while keeping the old one close and trying to raise the next generation to honour the past as well as the future.

Viet Thanh Nguyen's short story collection The Refugees is very strong, smart, and affecting, centered on the Vietnamese experience but shifting between characters and perspectives to interact with the nation's history, people, and culture in fresh and surprising ways: a Vietnamese man reeling from his divorce and attempting to close a gap with his distant, disapproving father; a former American military man visiting his daughter in the country he fought in; a girl in her family living in modern Ho Chi Minh City, she and her siblings named after her fathers first family that fled as refugees. Nguyen does an excellent job of varying style, tone, and composition for each story, so each has a unique perspective to offer and never feels redundant to what's come before. The (slight downside) is that it doesn't always feel like a collection birthed as whole, but rather separate parts coming together in one volume. And indeed, in the copyright page, one can see that various versions of these stories appeared in journals and magazines over the course of a few years. Of the 8 stories included, I thought 4 were fabulous, 2 very well done on the whole, and 2 a bit weaker and perhaps a bit out of place in terms of caliber of storytelling and collective relevance. It's that tangible lack of a collective intent or thrust that pegged this read at 4 stars as opposed to 5, and short story collections can be trickier to review. But ultimately I really enjoyed the vast majority of Nguyen's The Refugees and admired the prose and was entertained and informed, even if it didn't quite come together cohesively enough for it to be spectacular for me, it was more than solid. And while I did not enjoy Nguyen's The Sympathizer on my first attempt reading it, my response to his writing here makes me want to give that Pulitzer Prize winner another shot.

Standout stories: "Black Eyed Woman", "The War Years", "I'd Love You to Want Me", "Fatherland"

I recommended this book as part of LitHub's Books to Read in February feature:

http://lithub.com/16-books-to-read-this-february/

"As a follow up to his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Sympathizers, Viet Thanh Nguyen brings us The Refugees, a glittering and well-observed novel about the lives of refugees as they migrate between two worlds. We meet a young Vietnamese refugee who comes to live with two gay men in San Francisco, a woman who learns of her dying husband’s mistress, and a Vietnamese girl who reunites with her Americanized sister. At a time when the American federal government is questioning more than ever the value of refugees’ lives, this book is not only a moving read—it’s utterly necessary."

I don't know if I could have picked a more perfect time to read (and review) The Refugees by Viet Thanh Nguyen. With the current political climate in America, as well as a pending visit home to see my own Vietnamese mother, these stories hit home in more ways than one.

Vietnam is some place that is familiar to me, despite me never having visited. I grew up seeing those airmail envelopes arriving once a month, to then having 13 additional family members sharing a house to now my youngest sister living in my mother's home country. This collection of stories, to me, is reading the stories of my family. These are stories of immigration and hardship. These are the stories that apply to all hard working, IMMIGRANTS, from every country. This is the America that I'm here for, these are the Americans that I'm proud to be part of.

Viet Thanh Nguyen has been praised for The Sympathizer as well as this book and for good reason. He's a rising star in the lit world and to me, he's one of the stars of contemporary Vietnamese writers.

I received this book via NetGalley in exchange for this review.

Terrific topical exploration of the refugee experience. Short stories collections are wonderful to dip in and out of but this short book is one I read in a gulp. Nguyen's language and writing elevate these tales of Vietnamese immigrants. Thanks to netgalley for the ARC. This is well worth your time.

The stories in this book are moving and emotional and they stick with you for a long time. These stories spoke to me. Though the stories were short, I still felt connected to the characters. I was truly wowed by this book and Nguyen's writing style and I look forward to reading more by this author in the future. I predict that Nguyen will remembered as one of the best writers of our time.

I am not a fan of short stories. About the time I get invested in the characters the story ends. And it's so hard for much to happen in such a short number of pages. Like looking at a photo instead of a video. That said, I had enjoyed The Sympathizer and jumped at a chance to get an advance copy of this book. The writing here is good and you get a real feel for time, place and person. The stories cover the various aspects of assimilation of the refugees into American life. These are not happy stories. The unhappiness of being forced out of their homeland permeates all the characters. The absence of knowledge about their adopted home weighs on them. My problem with many of the stories is that they end abruptly. You turn a page thinking anxious to know what now and there is nothing. Just the start of another story.

Of all the stories, my favorite was I Want You to Want Me. A wife taking care of a husband with Alzheimer's has to accept him beginning to call her by another woman’s name, a name she doesn't recognize at all. And he insists they've done things for which she has no memory. Here, Nguyen perfectly captures all the questions that go through her head.

I'm giving this three stars. But to be honest, I think my unwillingness to give it a higher rating comes back down to my dislike for the format. If you are a fan of short stories, I think you'll like these. But if you're not a fan of the short format, I don't think these stories will change your mind.

My thanks to netgalley and Grove Press for an advance copy of this book.