The Displaced

Resumen del libro

Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Sympathizer Viet Thanh Nguyen called on 17 fellow refugee writers from across the globe to shed light on their experiences, and the result is The Displaced, a powerful dispatch from the individual lives behind current headlines, with proceeds to support the International Rescue Committee (IRC). Today the world faces an enormous refugee crisis 22.5 million people fleeing persecution and conflict from Myanmar to Syria, closer to the flight of Jewish and other Europeans during World War II than anything the world has seen in this generation. Yet in the United States, United Kingdom, and other countries with the means to welcome refugees, anti-immigration politics and fear seem poised to shut the door. Even for readers seeking to help, the sheer scale of the problem renders the experience of refugees hard to comprehend. Viet Nguyen, called one of our great chroniclers of displacement (Joyce Carol Oates, The New Yorker), brings together writers originally from Mexico, Bosnia, Iran, Afghanistan, Soviet Ukraine, Hungary, Chile, Ethiopia, and others to make their stories heard. They are formidable in their own right MacArthur Genius grant recipients, National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award finalists, filmmakers, speakers, lawyers, professors, and New Yorker contributors and they are all refugees, many as children arriving in London and Toronto, Oklahoma and Minnesota, South Africa and Germany. Their 17 contributions are as diverse as their own lives have been, and yet hold just as many themes in common. Reyna Grande questions the line between official refugee and illegal immigrant, chronicling the disintegration of the family forced to leave her behind; Fatima Bhutto visits Alejandro Iñárritu's virtual reality border crossing installation Flesh and Sand ; Aleksandar Hemon recounts a gay Bosnian's answer to his question, How did you get here? ; Thi Bui offers two uniquely striking graphic panels; David Bezmozgis writes about uncovering new details about his past and attending a hearing for a new refugee; and Hmong writer Kao Kalia Yang recalls the courage of children in a camp in Thailand. These essays reveal moments of uncertainty, resilience in the face of trauma, and a reimagining of identity, forming a compelling look at what it means to be forced to leave home and find a place of refuge. The Displaced is also a commitment: ABRAMS will donate 10 percent of the cover price of this book, a minimum of 25,000 annually, to the International Rescue Committee, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to providing humanitarian aid, relief, and resettlement to refugees and other victims of oppression or violent conflict. List of Contributors:Joseph AzamDavid BezmozgisFatima BhuttoThi BuiAriel DorfmanLev GolinkinReyna GrandeMeron HaderoAleksandar HemonJoseph KertesPorochista KhakpourMarina LewyckaMaaza MengisteDina NayeriVu TranNovuyo Rosa TshumaKao Kalia Yang

Biografía del autor

Viet Thanh Nguyen (1971) nació en Vietnam y creció en Estados Unidos. Es el ganador del Premio Pulitzer de Ficción 2016 por la novela The Sympathizer. Es autor de los libros académicos Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War y Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America. Desde hace muchos años ejerce como crítico cultural para Los Angeles Times e imparte clases de Literatura Inglesa y American Studies and Ethnicity en la Universidad de Southern California. Es editor del blog Diacritics.org, centrado en el arte, la cultura y la política vietnamitas desde la diáspora . Vive en Los Ángeles.