NBC News online
With tens of millions of people fleeing persecution and conflict today as refugees, according to the United Nations, these voices and stories are more timely than ever.
PBS Online
Powerful and deeply moving personal stories about the physical and emotional toll one endures when forced out of one’s homeland.
Literary Hub
Each essay is worthwhile.
Electric Literature
Poignant and timely, these essays ask us to live with our eyes wide open during a time of geo-political crisis. Also, 10% of the cover price of the book will be donated annually to the International Rescue Committee, so I hope readers will help support this book and the vast range of voices that fill its pages.
The Minneapolis Star Tribune
With more than a dozen essays on refugees from writers throughout the world, the collection — edited by Nguyen — attempts a vital task: to give voice to the oft-silenced and to redirect the current stream of anti-refugee rhetoric and sentiment in a more just and humanizing direction. The end result is an accessible and engaging dialogue that mines memories, many of them traumatic, and delivers on its global message of displacement and loss... it goes without saying that Nguyen’s collection, with its unapologetic repositioning of the refugee front and center, couldn’t have arrived at a more critical time.
The Millions
There is no single refugee story, and as the editor of The Displaced, a collection of refugee writers exploring and reflecting on their experiences, Viet Thanh Nguyen gives these stories room to breath and unfurl.
The Week
Nguyen and 17 other writers share their own experiences with displacement and immigration, and their… stories remind us why every culture needs newcomers.
Bustle
…an incisive and heartbreaking exploration of the refugee crisis…
Bay Area News Group
… “The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives” seeks to give voice to the experience of being forced to leave one place and seek a home elsewhere, and challenge the political identity given to refugees by virtue of being unwanted.
The San Francisco Chronicle
Together, the stories share similar threads of loss and adjustment, of the confusion of identity, of wounds that heal and those that don’t, of the scars that remain.“
Minneapolis Star-Tribune
One of the Ten Best Books of the Year
World Literature Today
The essays are consistently both eloquent and riveting.
The Economist
In this collection of 17 essays (one consisting of cartoons) by writers who were forced to leave their homes, Viet Thanh Nguyen, a Pulitzer-winning novelist and himself a Vietnamese refugee to America, begins to assemble one. In so doing he gives ordinary Westerners a heart-wrenching insight into the uprooted lives led in their midst…the collection succeeds in demonstrating that this dispersed community in some ways resembles other nations. It has its founding myths, but its citizens all have their own tragedies, victories and pain—and each has a story to tell.
Entertainment Weekly
"The book is being published at a time when discourse around refugees has shifted distressingly in the Trump era, with new caps on refugee settlement being instituted and immigration bans remaining clear policy positions.
School Library Journal
★ 09/01/2018
Edited by the Pulitzer Prize–winning author and Vietnamese American professor, this heartbreaking collection of essays humanizes the refugee experience. Accomplished writers tackle the differences between refugees and immigrants and how Donald Trump's election and Brexit influenced the perception of refugees in the United States and Europe. Most moving are tales of parents and children who left their homes for better lives yet lost so much of themselves. Contributors describe harrowing escapes, economically driven evacuations, and wartime disasters that forced them out of many countries: Mexico, Bosnia, Thailand, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Chile, Ukraine, Ethiopia, Hungary, Iran, Zimbabwe, China, and more. Dina Nayeri's "The Ungrateful Refugee," about childhood bullying, and Meron Hadero's "To Walk in Their Shoes," a chronicle of his parents' path from Ethiopia to Germany to Czechoslovakia to Washington, DC, will especially resonate with teens. VERDICT U.S. policy about refugees, asylum seekers, and migrants will continue to make headlines for years—this book is an essential purchase for all libraries and a must for displays on current events.—Sarah Hill, Lake Land College, Mattoon, IL
