In-Store: Kevin Nguyen: My Documents w/ Tracy O'Neill

Event guidelines:

• All attendees are strongly encouraged to wear a face mask at all times.
• Tickets are limited to restrict capacity at our store, and each ticket will include either a copy of the featured book or a $10 Books Are Magic gift card.
• Additional copies of the book will be available for purchase at the event.
• A signing will follow the talk.
• Home address is collected for contact tracing purposes; it will not be used otherwise.
• The event will also be livestreamed for free here: https://youtube.com/live/2khVGw43IvE
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The paths of four family members diverge drastically when the U.S. government begins detaining Vietnamese Americans, in this sharp and touching novel about growing up at the intersection of ambition and assimilation.
Ursula, Alvin, Jen, and Duncan grew up as cousins in the sprawling Nguyen family, but the truth about their family is much more complicated. As young adults, they're on the precipice of new ventures—Ursula as a budding journalist in Manhattan, Alvin as an engineering intern for Google, Jen as a naive freshman at NYU, and Duncan as a promising newcomer on his high school football team. Their lives are upended when a series of violent, senseless attacks across America create a national panic, prompting a government policy forcing Vietnamese Americans into internment camps. Jen and Duncan are sent with their mother to Camp Tacoma while Ursula and Alvin receive exemptions.
Cut off entirely from the outside world, Jen and Duncan try to withstand long dusty days in camp, forced to work jobs they hate and acclimate to life without the internet. That is until Jen discovers a way to get messages to the outside. Her first instinct is to reach out to Ursula, who sees this as an opportunity to tell the world about the horrors of detention—and bolster her own reporting career in the process.
Informed by real-life events from Japanese incarceration, the Vietnam War, and modern-day immigrant detention, Kevin Nguyen gives us a version of reality only a few degrees away from our own—much too close for comfort. Moving and finely attuned to both the brutalities and mundanities of racism in America, Mỹ Documents is a strangely funny and touching portrait of American ambition, fear, and family. The story of the Nguyens is one of resilience and how we return to each other, and to ourselves, after tragedy.

Kevin Nguyen is the author of the novel New Waves. He is the features editor at The Verge, where he publishes award-winning stories about labor, business, and policing, and was previously a senior editor at GQ. He lives in Brooklyn.

Tracy O’Neill is the author of the memoir Woman of Interest and the novels The Hopeful and Quotients. She was named a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree, longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and was a Narrative 30 Below finalist. She was also named a Center for Fiction Emerging Writers Fellow. O’Neill teaches at Vassar College, and her writing has appeared in Granta, the New York Times, Rolling Stone, the Atlantic, The New Yorker, Bookforum, and other publications.

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