**I received an advance copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

In little over two years, Viet Thanh Nguyen has emerged as a leading figure in the literary world, winning the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for his astounding crime/immigrant/Vietnam War thriller The Sympathizer and getting shortlisted for the National Book Award and National Book Critics Choice award in non-fiction for Nothing Ever Dies (which is an academic book intended to accompany The Sympathizer).

Nguyen has also been serving as the cultural critic at large for the Los Angeles Times, writing about literature and politics through a biting radical lens (which is refreshing when the literary world tends to be rather bland and liberal, even in these dark times of Trump.

For someone who has had his pulse on American cultural and political life, it is both fortuitous and fitting that Nguyen's new short story collection entitled The Refugees, dedicated to "all refugees",is being released in the shadow of Trump's draconian ban on refugees from seven Muslim countries.

The Refugees is a collection of eight short stories, offering insights into various refugee experiences, mostly focused on the Vietnamese diaspora that emigrated from South East Asia in the years after the end of the American war in the region. Nguyen touches on themes of regret and loss, of trying to outrun the experiences and memories that turned one into a refugee, of the political cultures that transposed themselves from home country to new home, and the struggles that refugees experience in their new countries, both of survival and dealing with expectations from those they left behind.

As with The Sympathizer, Nguyen's writing drives the forcefulness of his stories. He writes thoughtful sentences that layer on top of each other to create both atmosphere and mood but also complexity, making the reader dig deep into the text to understand the motivations and actions of his characters. The stories he gives us are painful and somber, yet also with a touch of outlandish humour he pulled off so well in his previous novel.

As the current US Administration seeks to vilify the refugee populations that were products of American imperial adventures, Nguyen's collection is both powerful and necessary. We need to hear the painful pasts that have driven people to leave their homes and families, to understand and empathize with their experiences and appreciate the stakes they (and humanity) face if we ignore them and further marginalize them.

For this reason alone, I urge you all to pick up the book. It's a quick and easy read, yet will give you the energy to keep on struggling for the rights of refugees now and in the future.

I think it was clearly well written, but much like with his novel, The Sympathizer, I had a hard time following the threads of the stories. It's the stream-of-consciousness thing that I can rarely wrap my head around and, while it doesn't change the greatness of the writing, it takes the story down a notch for me. The first few stories in this kept me captivated, but overall, I just don't think he's a writer for me.

THE REFUGEES, Viet Thanh Nguyen’s collection of eight excellent short stories centers around lives of those uprooted from Vietnam, often desperately, and transplanted in America. These stories bring ghosts with them, even in the author’s acknowledgments. “The Black-Eyes Women," the powerful first story is explicit in ghosts lost to brutality, veiling the ghost of the unspeakable past in a “nameless blue boat.” The ghostwriter, a young woman in her early thirties, lives in the silence of writing and the unhealed scars of the past. As one character says in his grief, “The dead move on…But the living, we just stay here.” The eight stories’ characters, unfolding with a subtle restraint and the author’s superb timing, are varied in all the ways people and relationships in cultures are. There is the “Vietnamese soul” present in each story, in the tales of escaping in war’s upheaval, fraying bonds in families between their worlds in two countries, revisiting the old country, and making new lives in a land where one feels a "stranger in a strange land." But this is not a collection with boundaries of history’s rights and wrongs, political victories, and war’s global history. This is a world of relationships, fathers and children, wives and husbands, refugees with refugees in a different country that frightens, jars, and alters them. At times tales based on immigration carry an inherent glow of a nearly mythical homeland and the jangling new country, even with its own benefits. Not here. This writer knows well his characters and their ghosts - ghosts of the dead, the living, the failed dreams, the slipping away of those before our eyes, the weakening bonds, and disappointed expectations. Often, the stories are about what we all face in life – love, loss, death, illness.

We live in a time now where “the other” – refugee – is a flashpoint word. These stories bring us inside the refugee’s mind, world, memories, pain, daily life, and fears. The ghosts remain, but the presence of “the other” does not, even when the character is less than ethical or not likeable. That is the talent of an exceptional writer, who writes of the young child far removed from the scarred landscape of ghosts, who finds anyone deprived of seeing Star Wars feels “the country in which he lived surely needed a revolution.” This is not “the other.” The loyalty of a wife to a husband slipping away. The tenderness of a father and daughter bond rising out of the dust of discord. While we may not have their ghosts, they are us, and we are them. The writer gives us that, and we need it desperately right now. Today.

An exceptional, marvelous, memorable book of stories. I hope there will be more collections of short stories by this Pulitzer Prize winning author.

Thank you to NetGalley, Grove Press and Viet Thanh Nguyen for the ARC.

The refugees is a collection of stories about Vietnamese refugees. Their ghosts, fears, peculiarities, and idiosyncrasies. The book highlights aspects of the Vietnamese culture such as music, food, relationship dynamics, and values. It also highlights how refugees sometimes struggle with the differences between in culture between their homeland and their adopted home. Some of the stories are funny, but I found none of them outstanding or remarkable enough to leave a lasting impression. The writing is great, the stories creatively told, but I just couldn't connect with the book... I'm not sure what to make of it.

Such timely stories that are so very well written about Vietnamese refugees and their lives. A great reminder that this country was made of immigrants, refugees being the most vulnerable and impactful. It's so important for the country's future to have open borders for folks like these described in this work.

Politics aside, the writing is impeccable and the stories are very engaging. I highly recommend this book!

This is a collection of 8 short stories by Pulitzer Prize winner Viet Thanh Nguyen. After reading these, I'm now much more inclined to pick up his winning debut The Sympathizer. I can honestly say I enjoyed all the stories in this compilation. All of them are about the experience of leaving one country for another, but each story was unique. They are about culture and identity but I really loved how they examined relationships - between parents and children, husbands and wives, between siblings - with great insight. My favorite was "I'd love you to want me", which was about a devoted wife whose husband was suffering from Alzheimer's. Some humorous, some deeply moving, all written skillfully but in a simple manner, i.e. few words and yet still managing to create a vivid sense of place and complex characters. Definitely recommended.
I received an ARC via NetGalley.

This collection of short stories showcases various aspects of immigration with an assortment of Vietnamese characters. I liked the many faces of diaspora and problems of cultural identity that came through in these stories, and the writing style was nice, as well. Choosing a story with slight magical realism elements as the first one in the book threw me off, though, as I thought this would be a recurring theme throughout. Also, in some of the stories, the titular "refugee" topic is not apparent at all - those were still good stories, but maybe more fit for a different collection. Overall, though, this is a great read.

I personally could not get past Nguyen's fourth story. I enjoyed the stories, and they were definitely simple enough for a reader 14+ to interpret and understand.
The first story details a ghost-writer of stories for others: a writer of memoirs for *other people*. The irony is not lost that the author, nameless but female, is also but a shell of her former self. Having lost her brother to violence suffered at sea, it seems she too hast lost herself. This story was an interesting look at ghosts, both living and lost.
The 2nd story follows Liem, who from his arrival is misunderstood (can't even pronounce his name correctly!). He stays with Parrish and Marcus, two homoexual men living in San Francisco during the 1970s. Liem gets a job and tries to understand himself as a member of the United States. This story provided complex look at refugees, the families they leave behind, and one's own understanding of his sexuality.
"War Years"--story 3--details the early eighties and the thirteen year old narrator's family struggles. His parents own a grocery shop and they are confronted by an area woman seeking money to help the resistance against Communists in Vietnam. The narrative showcases typical teen conflicts of conscience but also the extra layers of hardship for many immigrants: money, politics, and loyalties to love and land. Of the four I read, this one was my favorite.
The fourth story was my least favorite, "The Transplant." Not only was it more confusing than the others, but I failed to see the theme the author was attempting to impart on readers.
Overall, I feel this book would be an excellent selection for a non-Western literature course, as it offers perspective on current affairs as well as past.

I'm not a short story reader. Or am I? Every year for the past four years a collection of short stories has made my "Top Ten Litpicks" of the year. The Refugees is definitely a contender for this year. I thought this collection of 8 stories was really something special. The stories are not really linked but they are definitely cohesive - each one dealing with a Vietnamese refugee. My favorites: a man who receives a new liver and goes out of his way to find the donor's family. A young man, divorced and now living with his father, lets his father make some big life decisions on his behalf. I don't know. They were all good. 4.5 stars, possibly rounded up depending on what else the year may bring.

II wanted nothing more than to devour The Refugees in one go as a famished person at a feast. The Refugees paints vivid portraits of individuals making their lives in a new country while having one foot firmly planted in their hometowns. All the characters masterfully wrought by Nguyen live and struggle with their pasts as they navigate relationships with their families and friends. They are human and haunted in and by the choices they've made and those that were made for them.

This is a series of 8 short stories about Vietnamese refugees in the United States and their families. One of the stories is about a Vietnamese couple where the college professor husband is suffering from Alzheimer's. Another story is of couple operates a grocery store in the New Saigon section of a California city. A couple stories are about the children of Vietnamese women who married American soldiers. There is a story of a wealthy Vietnamese man whose first wife and children fled to the US when he was imprisoned and "reeducated" . One story is about a young male refugee sponsored by a gay man who lived with a partner in San Francisco. Another tale is about a Vietnamese gangster. Then there is the story about ghosts of people who died fleeing the war in Viet Nam.

Each of these well written stories gives the reader a different insight into what life was like in Viet Nam that forced these people to flee and how the experiences formed them. Each short story was previously published by the author in a periodical or journal.

The Refugees is a collection of eight short stories made cohesive by the fact the protagonists are Vietnamese refugees and their immediate families.

The stories are diverse and extremely powerful. The writing is simple, but not simplistic. It's economical, without fancy language flourishes, yet it packs a punch. The characters are complex, their stories, more often than not, heartbreaking.

There are so many layers, so many unexpected situations, and circumstances. There is a lot to take away from each story.

I can't rave enough about this book. It's exquisite, poignant and compelling. And so current.

I need to get my hands on The Sympathizer , because I'm so impressed with Thanh Nguyen's writing, I need to read his Pulitzer-winning novel.

A must read!

The Refugees

The Refugees is a collection of stunning short stories about the hopes, dreams and aspirations of people who leave one country to live in another.

I really would implore people to pick this book up and give it a chance. It really is one of the most beautifully thought provoking and inspiring books I've ever had the privilege of reading.

I voluntarily reviewed an ARC of this book, with thanks to Netgalley and the publisher. 5*+++

<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30358505-the-refugees" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px"><img border="0" alt="The Refugees" src="https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1470284522m/30358505.jpg" /></a><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30358505-the-refugees">The Refugees</a> by <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/282390.Viet_Thanh_Nguyen">Viet Thanh Nguyen</a><br/>
My rating: <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1847033850">4 of 5 stars</a><br /><br />
I really enjoyed this book of short stories about Vietnamese refugees and their lives here in America, and some parts taking place in Vietnam.<br /><br />This was both dark, and sometimes funny, and all of them about love and family.<br /><br />My favorite was "I'd love you to want me", but they were all very good. <br /><br />Thank you to NetGalley, Grove Atlantic, and Viet Thanh Nguyen for the ARC.
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<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/12851291-karen">View all my reviews</a>

In these stories about Vietnamese refugees, Vietnamese Americans, Vietnamese perspectives of America, and American perspectives of Vietnam, Nguyen covers a lot of ground. These are relevant, important stories to read in this tumultuous time in history, as we prepare to swear into the highest office in the land a man who is staunchly against helping refugees like we see in this collection. These characters live through unbelievable horror and then must adjust to life in a foreign country, raising children who cannot understand the terror their parents lived through. As a white woman in the States, I have never experienced even an ounce of what refugees (both the fictional ones found in The Refugees and real-life ones today) endure to survive in a world that shuffles them place to place because we deny them safety and sanctuary. That’s what makes these stories so powerful, to me, because it’s a history lesson, a lesson in modern politics, and a lesson of empathy, all at once.

While the writing never awed me, this was a well-rounded collection that easily kept me turning pages. It’s a good, solid collection, and as always, these are the voices we need to be reading, more than ever, heading into 2017.

I haven't read this author's Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Sympathizer, so I was glad to have the opportunity to read this short volume of stories to get a feel for his writing and now I will for sure read it. The author immediately with captivating writing invites you to meet not just the characters in the present, but we learn about their pasts as well . We meet the ghosts, their families, the culture, the country of of their birth - Vietnam , and inevitably the undercurrent of the war's impact on their lives . The stories are not connected by common characters but yet these stories are connected by the common experience of the characters who survived the war in Vietnam and have found their way to America . However, that is not the focus of every story . It is not just about being in America as refugees, but about universal themes of finding one's identity, coming to terms with the past, facing dementia, family dynamics.

I was really taken by the writing of these eight distinct stories. I enjoyed all of them but my favorites were "Black-eyed Women", about a ghostwriter remembering her traumatic past as she meets the ghost of her brother, who died trying to protect her as the family was making an escape from Vietnam on a small boat and " I'd Love You to Want Me", a touchingly beautiful and sad story about loss of memory and the rediscovery of love. "The Americans" brought back to mind a time I remember with the divergent views of a father, a pilot in the Vietnam war and his daughter- reflecting the differences that we felt in this country about the war and about the returning soldiers. But yet this was also about relationships and familial love .

I don't mean to be facetious, but one of the main reasons I don't connect very well with short stories is that they are just too short . Not long enough to know the characters, sometimes not long enough to get the story, what the author is trying to say . This was not the case here . I highly recommended this well written collection of stories that I found to be moving and impactful and full of the human experience.

I received an advanced copy of this book from Grove Press through both Edelweiss and NetGalley .

This is such an exciting time in American literature that we can enjoy the gorgeous language and careful craftsmanship of really very fine short stories and novels in English in the American tradition but from traditionally silent participants in our nation’s pageant: immigrants and people of color. These voices began speaking up some time ago, but if you looked at the award lists until recently, people of color weren’t often on them. That has changed, and right now, before cultures become indistinguishable from one another in the wealth churn, the special character and individual voice of different groups is our bounty to reap.

Nguyen just wows me with his capture of the immigrant experience from so many different directions in this collection of stories. Not only is his language clear and expressive and to the point, his stories are rounded and fulfilling. They tell us something, like dispatches from a new world.

A section called “The War Years” has a story that is not actually about the war we usually think of. We’re in L.A., in Little Saigon, in a grocery store where we breathe in the smell the dried cuttlefish and star anise in the crowded aisles. Father (Ba), mother (Ma), and Long (do I need to say?), a thirteen-year-old for whom school, even summer school, felt like a vacation, worked at the store every day, even Sundays after Mass.

Ma is the real deal: waking everyone up in the mornings, keeping house, making meals, counting cash. She owns seven pastel outfits, and with makeup and a squirt of scent (gardenia), she is ready to man the cash register. We hear the scratch of her nylons as she rubs one ankle against the other. She knows the margins on every item in the store, even the 50-lb bags of rice in the loft above kitchenware.

Mrs. Hao visits the store regularly to ask for contributions to “fight the Communists,” but Ma thinks that fight is over. She follows Mrs. Hao home one day to confront her and discovers a fight that is all too real.

The story is so richly told, its depths just keep churning up new insights. And yet it is not alone. “The Transplant” introduces us to Arthur Arellano, a man with several overlapping and reflexive problems—problems which influence each other. Despite “transplant” bringing to mind “immigrant,” in this story the word has a more literal meaning.

The characters in all these stories have complex problems, complex attachments, complex lives. In “Someone Else Besides You,” a thirty-three-year-old man lives with his father after his own divorce, but his widower father, despite his own proclivities for mistresses, is constantly urging his son to pursue the former wife. See what I mean? Complex.

One story, “The Americans,” depicts a twenty-six-year-old woman who has been teaching English in Vietnam for two years already, living in a town that also hosts a nonprofit engaged in demining. She invites her parents to visit, to meet her boyfriend, to see her housing, her life. The email inviting them is addressed to Mom and Dad, but James Carver, recently retired as a commercial airline pilot, knows it is mostly meant for her mother, who dreams about Vietnam's “bucolic” countryside. “He knew next to nothing about Vietnam except what it looked like at forty thousand feet.”

Nguyen conveys the silent, withheld anger and confusion that men can often exhibit: an inarticulateness that keeps them angry without them even knowing exactly why. James was so proud when his son graduated from Air Force Academy, but he marks his own decline from that moment: he felt he was growing stupider rather than wiser as he aged. That was just the moment that the torch passed, and it is a new world, not his own. If he could but speak his fears, he’d find he was not alone: the world could still be his, he’d just be sharing it.

His daughter Claire is just like daughters anywhere, thinking they know more than they do, speaking and acting so carelessly, so casually hurtful.
“Although she empathized with vast masses of people she had never met, total strangers who regarded her as a stranger and would kill her without hesitation given the chance, she did not extend any such feeling to him.”
Being a parent is tough stuff. One has to have the hide of a rhinoceros.

The technical skill manifest in this story is breathtaking. We are never explicitly told the man is black, married to a Japanese woman while stationed on Okinawa. Their children have grown up loved by their parents, but confused about their identities and disparaged by their schoolmates. James has endured a lifetime of confusion, including his job flying a bomber jet. Unspoken, unresolved resentment is the minefield.

Nguyen’s stories are feasts of insight, generously shared. We’re lucky folk, to have such a talent writing for us. The Sympathizer, Nguyen’s Pulitzer-winning novel out last year, was a big novel is every sense. He shows us here he can write engaging, enduring short fiction, and his nonfiction, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War, has likewise garnered critical attention. Nguyen is the Aerol Arnold Chair of English and Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. He has received residencies, fellowships, honors, awards, and grants from a wide range of admiring and grateful organizations.

Refugees are a big American business--not the hosting of refugees, which is carried on by dedicated church and non-profit organizations across the country--but, since the 1960s, the creating of refugees by various military adventures overseas.

The current crop of refugees, streaming into Europe and dribbling into the US, are from war-torn Iraq and Afghanistan. In previous generations, the country has seen streams of 1990s-era Kurds and Haitians, 1980s-era Salvadorans and Nicaraguans, all dating back to the 1970s, when Vietnamese--loyal to the United States during the decade-long war in their country--sought refuge away from the re-education camps and oppression of their now-communist country.

Viet Thanh Nguyen's book uses the definite "the" to describe refugees, even though the tales told within are all of Vietnamese and Vietnamese-Americans, they experiences the book charts provide a look at what later refugee migrations--and their progeny--did and will experience in their new, American homes. Indeed, Nguyen dedicates this collection of short stories "for all refugees, everywhere."

Nguyen's stories follow an interesting arc, from escape to return. The opening story, "Black-Eyed Women" is a ghost story that reveals a terrible loss during a seaborne escape from Vietnam. The final story, "Fatherland," reunites an American-born Vietnamese-American woman with her father and his second family back in the home country. This last, full-circle story was my favorite, cutting well through a generation of myths that Vietnamese tell themselves about Americans and Americans portray about themselves.

(The latter isn't just a Vietnamese thing. It's universal. I met a distant German cousin earlier this year who told me, "When I was growing up, I imagined that a family member had gone to America and grown fabulously wealthy." I had grown up imagining that there must be a castle in the Fatherland with my family's name on it! We were both, obviously, wrong.)

A recurring theme of the book is broken marriages, often caused by the escape from the mother country. Refugees create new families in America yet remain connected emotionally and financially to relatives/families in the old country. The children of separation struggle to build relationships in a generation of transition, not-quite Vietnamese, not-quite American.

Nguyen's scope is focused on the Vietnamese diaspora in America, but his themes are universal. Looking up from this book to see news on TV of the current wave of refugees, I couldn't help but appreciate its relevance and foresight.

Special thanks to NetGalley and First Grove Atlantic for providing me with an advanced galley in exchange for an honest review.

This book is a series of eight short stories. They are stories of pain, loss and memories. These are fictional stories of Vietnamese refugees in the US and how they adjusted, or not, to life in another country. One family sees ghosts and talks about what ifs: "If we hadn't had a war," she said that night, her wistfulness drawing me closer, "we'd be like the Koreans now. Saigon would be Seoul, your father alive, you married with children, me a retired housewife, not a manicurist."

"We would come outside after the bombing, you holding my hand while we stood blinking in the sun."
"But I guess oil was to be found in every part of the world, just like anger and sorrow."

Viet Thanh Nguyen was interviewed on CSPAN talking about his books and it is available on their website, booktv.org
I rate it 3.5 stars, rounded up to 4, out of 5 stars. Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for sending me this book