In conversation with Alexander Chee, author of Edinburgh, The Queen of the Night, and How To Write An Autobiographical Novel, and associate professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College

Viet Thanh Nguyen won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Sympathizer, the “intelligent, relentlessly paced and savagely funny” (Wall Street Journal) tale of a South Vietnamese army captain who immigrates to Los Angeles and reports on his fellow military exiles to the Viet Cong. The novel was also awarded the Dayton Literary Peace Prize for Fiction and the Edgar Award for Best First Novel, among many other honors. Nguyen is also the author of Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War, a nonfiction companion to The Sympathizer, and the acclaimed short story collection The Refugees. An English professor at the University of Southern California, he has earned fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations. With The Committed, Nguyen has created a literary thriller and a novel of ideas that continues the story of the The Sympathizer’s main character titular sympathizer as he experiences the delights and dangers of Paris.