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.

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.

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.

**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.