To Save and to Destroy: Writing as an Other (The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures) - Hardcover

Nguyen, Viet Thanh

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0674298179 ISBN 13: 9780674298170

Publisher: Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press, 2025

Synopsis

Shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism

From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Sympathizer comes a moving and unflinchingly personal meditation on the literary forms of otherness and a bold call for expansive political solidarity.

Born in war-ravaged Vietnam, Viet Nguyen arrived in the United States as a child refugee in 1975. The Nguyen family would soon move to San Jose, California, where the author grew up, attending UC Berkeley in the aftermath of the shocking murder of Vincent Chin, which shaped the political sensibilities of a new generation of Asian Americans.

The essays here, delivered originally as the prestigious Norton Lectures, proffer a new answer to a classic literary question: What does the outsider mean to literary writing? Over the course of six captivating and moving chapters, Nguyen explores the idea of being an outsider through lenses that are, by turns, literary, historical, political, and familial.

Each piece moves between writers who influenced Nguyen’s craft and weaves in the haunting story of his late mother’s mental illness. Nguyen unfolds the novels and nonfiction of Herman Melville, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ralph Ellison, William Carlos Williams, and Maxine Hong Kingston, until aesthetic theories give way to pressing concerns raised by war and politics. What is a writer’s responsibility in a time of violence? Should we celebrate fiction that gives voice to the voiceless―or do we confront the forces that render millions voiceless in the first place? What are the burdens and pleasures of the “minor” writer in any society? Unsatisfied with the modest inclusion accorded to “model minorities” such as Asian Americans, Nguyen sets the agenda for a more radical and disquieting solidarity with those whose lives have been devastated by imperialism and forever wars.

About this title

About the Author

Viet Thanh Nguyen is the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Sympathizer, Nothing Ever Dies, and To Save and to Destroy. A recipient of the MacArthur Foundation and Guggenheim fellowships and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Nguyen is a Writer in Residence at the University of Southern California.

Edition details

• Publisher: Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0674298179
• ISBN 13: 9780674298170
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 144