The Spring Book Club with Viet Thanh Nguyen

Join us for our Spring Book Club event, featuring Pulitzer Prize-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen in an exclusive Canadian event for his novel, The Committed, sequel to The Sympathizer, also winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and International Dublin Literary Award. Be one of the first to read this highly-anticipated new work, then tune in May 16 for a live event moderated by 2019 Scotiabank Giller Prize winner Ian Williams, including an intimate audience Q&A with the author himself.

Ticket buyers to our Spring Book Club will receive a hardcover of The Committed as part of their purchase. Signed bookplates are also available on a first-come-first-serve basis.

Communist spies, drug rings, betrayal and love fill the underbelly of Paris in the knockout sequel to Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Sympathizer. A Vietnamese American interdisciplinary professor, Nguyen has established himself as a peerless force in the literary world. Known for his deftly written and gracefully complex narratives, the author brings us back into the world of his nameless spy at the height of a turf war between rival gangs. 

Publishers Weekly lauds The Committed as an “exhilarating roller-coaster ride filled with violence, hidden identity, and meditations on whether the colonized can ever be free.” It is a work which explores and illuminates the complexities of two worlds and whatever loyalties may exist between. 

Nguyen proves a master at “balancing his hero’s existential despair with the lurid glow of a crime saga” (Kirkus Reviews) while delighting readers with a one-of-a-kind intellectual crime story embroiled in the lasting, terrible legacy of the Vietnam War.

A signed bookplate will be included with your order while supplies last. Books may be picked up at Granville Island’s Festival House between Monday, March 8–Friday, March 12 between 9am-5pm, or can be shipped to residential addresses for a nominal fee. Please note your preference while confirming your ticket. Alternative pickup arrangements can be made for orders placed after March 12, including evenings and weekends as needed, but are by appointment only.

 

Presented in partnership with SFU Continuing Studies.

 

Author bio

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.

Moderator bio

Ian Williams is the author of Reproduction, winner of the Scotiabank Giller Prize; Personals, shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Robert Kroetsch Poetry Book Award; Not Anyone's Anything, winner of the Danuta Gleed Literary Award for the best first collection of short fiction in Canada; and You Know Who You Are, a finalist for the ReLit Prize for poetry. He was named as one of ten Canadian writers to watch by CBC. Williams completed his Ph.D. in English at the University of Toronto, mentored by George Elliot Clarke, and is currently an assistant professor of poetry in the Creative Writing program at the University of British Columbia. He was the 2014-2015 Canadian Writer-in-Residence for the University of Calgary's Distinguished Writers Programme. He has held fellowships or residencies from the Banff Center, Vermont Studio Center, Cave Canem, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, and Palazzo Rinaldi in Italy. He was also a scholar at the National Humanities Center Summer Institute for Literary Study and is a judge for the 2018 Griffin prize. His writing has appeared in several North American journals and anthologies.

 

 

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