Texas Book Festival and BookPeople Present: Viet Thanh Nguyen

Texas Book Festival is honored to welcome Viet Thanh Nguyen in celebration of his latest book, To Save and To Destroy: Writing As An Other.

This is a ticketed event.

• Date: Sunday, November 9th
• Start time: 3:15 pm
• Run time: 45 minutes
• Location: State Theatre, 719 Congress Ave., Austin, TX 78701
• Your ticket purchase includes a copy of To Save and To Destroy: Writing As An Other. The author will sign books following the event.
• Please note: Each ticket purchase includes entry for one attendee

If you buy a ticket and are unable to attend:

• We will hold your book at BookPeople for 30 days after the event.
• We understand that things happen, but please only order a ticket if you currently plan to attend! Tickets are not to be used in place of pre-orders, etc.

Guidelines:

• Seating will be on a first-come, first-served basis.
• Texas Book Festival reserves the right to cancel or postpone this event if necessary.
• If you have any other questions, please visit our Eventbrite FAQ or email [email protected].

About the book (as provided by Harvard University Press):

From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Sympathizer (now an HBO series) comes a moving and unflinchingly personal meditation on the literary forms of otherness and a bold call for expansive political solidarity.

Born in war-ravaged Vietnam, Viet Nguyen arrived in the United States as a child refugee in 1975. The Nguyen family would soon move to San Jose, California, where the author grew up, attending UC Berkeley in the aftermath of the shocking M**der of Vincent Chin, which shaped the political sensibilities of a new generation of Asian Americans.

The essays here, delivered originally as the prestigious Norton Lectures, proffer a new answer to a classic literary question: What does the outsider mean to literary writing? Over the course of six captivating and moving chapters, Nguyen explores the idea of being an outsider through lenses that are, by turns, literary, historical, political, and familial.

Each piece moves between writers who influenced Nguyen’s craft and weaves in the haunting story of his late mother’s mental illness. Nguyen unfolds the novels and nonfiction of Herman Melville, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ralph Ellison, William Carlos Williams, and Maxine Hong Kingston, until aesthetic theories give way to pressing concerns raised by war and politics. What is a writer’s responsibility in a time of violence? Should we celebrate fiction that gives voice to the voiceless—or do we confront the forces that render millions voiceless in the first place? What are the burdens and pleasures of the “minor” writer in any society? Unsatisfied with the modest inclusion accorded to “model minorities” such as Asian Americans, Nguyen sets the agenda for a more radical and disquieting solidarity with those whose lives have been devastated by imperialism and forever wars.

About the author:

Viet Thanh Nguyen is the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Sympathizer, Nothing Ever Dies, and, most recently, To Save and to Destroy. A recipient of the MacArthur Foundation and Guggenheim fellowships and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Nguyen is Aerol Arnold Chair of English and Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California.

Purchasing a ticket to this event helps support both Texas Book Festival and BookPeople, the largest independent bookstore in Texas.

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