#216: Viet Thanh Nguyen, novelist and academic

Simon and Rachel speak with the novelist and academic Viet Thanh Nguyen. Born in Vietnam, Viet came to the United States as a refugee in 1975. He completed a PhD in English at Berkeley, moved to Los Angeles for a teaching position at the University of Southern California, and has been there ever since, now as a chair of English and Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity. Viet's first novel, "The Sympathizer", published in 2015, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and became a New York Times bestseller. HBO also turned "The Sympathizer" into a TV series in 2024, directed by Park Chan-wook. Viet's other books include "The Committed", a sequel to "The Sympathizer", "Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War" (a finalist for the National Book Award in non-fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award) and "Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America". We spoke to Viet about branching from academia into writing fiction, "The Sympathizer", and "The Cleaving," an anthology of work by Vietnamese diaspora writers.