Description:
A Man of Two Faces - Viet Thanh Nguyen - 2023
A Memoir, a History, a Memorial
By: Viet Thanh Nguyen
Narrated by: Viet Thanh Nguyen
Length: 8 hrs and 45 mins
Unabridged Audiobook
Release date: 10-03-23
Categories: Biographies & Memoirs, Art & Literature
Language: English
Publisher: Audible Studios
Format: mp3 64/48 mono
Note: Includes the accompanying supplemental enhancement (pdf) and the eBook (epub)
The highly original, blistering, and unconventional memoir by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Sympathizer, which has now sold over more than million copies worldwide.
With insight, humor, formal invention, and lyricism, Viet Thanh Nguyen rewinds the film of his own life in A Man of Two Faces. 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 United States 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 AMERICA™. 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 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.
About the Creator and Narrator
Viet Thanh Nguyen was born in Vietnam and raised in America. He is the author of The Committed, which continues the story of The Sympathizer, awarded the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction alongside seven other prizes. He is also the author of the short story collection The Refugees and 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: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives. 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.
©2023 Viet Thanh Nguyen. Recorded by arrangement with Grove Press, an imprint of Grove Atlantic, Inc. (P)2023 Audible, Inc.
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