A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, a History, a Memorial by Nguyen, Viet Thanh

A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, a History, a Memorial (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780802160508)

Vendor: Viet Thanh Nguyen
Product type: Books
Format: Hardcover
$28.00
$28.00
$28.00
Subtotal: $28.00
A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, a History, a Memorial by Nguyen, Viet Thanh

A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, a History, a Memorial

$28.00
A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, a History, a Memorial by Nguyen, Viet Thanh

A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, a History, a Memorial

$28.00
Format: Hardcover
Description
Description
x

LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD


The highly original, blistering, and unconventional memoir by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sympathizer, which has now sold over one million copies worldwide


With insight, humor, formal invention, and lyricism, in A Man of Two Faces Viet Thanh Nguyen rewinds the film of his own life. He expands the genre of personal memoir by acknowledging larger stories of refugeehood, colonization, and ideas about Vietnam and America, writing with his trademark sardonic wit and incisive analysis, as well as a deep emotional openness about his life as a father and a son.


At the age of four, Nguyen and his family are forced to flee his hometown of Ban Mê Thuột and come to the USA as refugees. After being removed from his brother and parents and homed with a family on his own, Nguyen is later allowed to resettle into his own family in suburban San José. But there is violence hidden behind the sunny façade of what he calls AMERICATM. One Christmas Eve, when Nguyen is nine, while watching cartoons at home, he learns that his parents have been shot while working at their grocery store, the SàiGòn Mới, a place where he sometimes helps price tins of fruit with a sticker gun. Years later, as a teenager, the blood-stirring drama of the films of the Vietnam War such as Apocalypse Now throw Nguyen into an existential crisis: how can he be both American and Vietnamese, both the killer and the person being killed? When he learns about an adopted sister who has stayed back in Vietnam, and ultimately visits her, he grows to understand just how much his parents have left behind. And as his parents age, he worries increasingly about their comfort and care, and realizes that some of their older wounds are reopening.


Profound in its emotions and brilliant in its thinking about cultural power, A Man of Two Faces explores the necessity of both forgetting and of memory, the promises America so readily makes and breaks, and the exceptional life story of one of the most original and important writers working today.



Author: Viet Thanh Nguyen
ISBN-10: 0802160506
ISBN-13: 9780802160508
Publisher: Grove Press
Language: English
Published: 10/03/2023
Pages: 400
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.30lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.30w x 1.40d
Award: National Book Awards - Nominee

Review Citation(s):
Library Journal Prepub Alert 05/01/2023 pg. 16
Kirkus Reviews 07/01/2023
Booklist 10/01/2023 pg. 16
Shelf Awareness 10/13/2023
Publishers Weekly 10/23/2023
BookPage 10/01/2023
By Viet Thanh Nguyen
By Viet Thanh Nguyen
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Viet Thanh Nguyen was born in Vietnam and raised in America. He is the author of The Sympathizer, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and soon to be an HBO Original Series; its sequel, The Committed; the short story collection The Refugees; the nonfiction book Nothing Ever Dies, a finalist for the National Book Award; and is the editor of an anthology of refugee writing, The Displaced. He is the Aerol Arnold Professor of English and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California and a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur foundations. He lives in Los Angeles.

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