Oct
24
th
2023
The Fitzgerald Theater
Tuesday
Oct
24
th
2023
The Fitzgerald Theater

MPR and Star Tribune present

Talking Volumes with Viet Thanh Nguyen

hosted by Kerri Miller
Doors Open

6PM

Show Starts

7PM

Ages

All Ages

Single event tickets

$32.50

4 event series package

$90

Minnesota Public Radio and the Star Tribune are proud to announce the 23rd season of Talking Volumes. Talking Volumes is hosted by award-winning journalist Kerri Miller. We are happy to announce that we will be back in the cozy confines of the Fitzgerald Theater this fall for discussions with four great authors.

A Man of Two Faces to be released October 3, 2023 Grove Press

About the Author

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; 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. 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.

About the book

In A MAN OF TWO FACES, Nguyen delivers a highly original, blistering, and unconventional memoir, rewinding the film of his own life with insight, humor, formal invention, and lyricism. 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 USA 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 and injured 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 has 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.

Performers


Viet Thanh Nguyen

Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer is a New York Times best seller and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Other honors include the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the Edgar Award for...

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Hosted By


Kerri Miller

Kerri Miller is host of MPR News with Kerri Miller and Talking Volumes. She was the political reporter for KARE 11 television in Minneapolis-St. Paul before coming to Minnesota Public Radio in...

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Venue


The Fitzgerald Theater

Since 1910

Built in 1910, the Fitzgerald Theater is Saint Paul’s oldest surviving theater space. Originally named the Sam S. Shubert Theater, it was one of four memorial theaters erected by entertainment-industry…

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