APSI Summer Book Club 2026: The Sympathizer

APSI's summer book club is back by popular demand. This year, the books have been chosen to set the stage for APSI's annual keynote talk (November 2026) which will feature author and professor Viet Thanh Nguyen. Professor Marguerite Nguyen (Duke) launches our two-book sequence with Nguyen's 2015 multiple award-winning debut novel, The Sympathizer. The discussion will take place online, so members of the community near and far are welcome to join. Be sure to register via Zoom (https://duke.zoom.us/meeting/register/GNPGJeflTyaOGJrb_J3DgQ). From the publisher With the pace and suspense of a thriller and prose that has been compared to Graham Greene and Vladimir Nabokov, "The Sympathizer" is a sweeping epic of love and betrayal. The narrator, a communist double agent, is a "man of two minds," a half-French, half-Vietnamese army captain who comes to America after the Fall of Saigon, and while building a new life with other Vietnamese refugees in Los Angeles is secretly reporting back to his communist superiors in Vietnam. "The Sympathizer" is a blistering exploration of identity and America, a gripping spy novel, and a powerful story of love and friendship. About the moderator Marguerite Nguyen is an Associate Professor of English. Her research and teaching cover American literature, Asian American literature, Vietnamese diasporic studies, critical refugee studies, and ecocriticism. She is author of "America's Vietnam: The Longue Durée of US Literature and Empire" (Temple University Press, 2018) and co-editor of "Refugee Cultures: Forty Years after the Vietnam War" (MELUS Special Issue, 2016). Her research has been supported by the Andrew Mellon Foundation, American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship, and National Humanities Center. She is also affiliated with the Asian American and Diaspora Studies Program. Her current project, "Refugee Ecologies," explores local-global understandings of the environment among Vietnamese refugee communities in New Orleans. It posits narratives of forced migration as a defining feature of the US South and of American literature more broadly.