Viet Thanh Nguyen

speaker

1,011 appearances 2 recordings 2 series first heard Sep 2025 last heard 7 May

Viet Thanh Nguyen’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.

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The Dan Le Batard Show · South Beach Sessions - Viet Thanh Nguyen · 18 Sep 2025 podcast

What would you choose?

Okay.

So for me, the devil didn't literally appear, but it felt like that was a choice I was sitting down with when I wrote The Sympathizer.

And I'm going to write what I care about, and I don't care if I win any prizes or make any money out of that.

So that was my rejection of this institution of literature and art that had saved me because when I came as a refugee boy to the United States and I was watching my parents struggle,

They didn't have any time to spend with me because they were working to save their lives and our lives.

So what did I do?

I just read a lot of books.

I read stories.

I fell in love with literature.

You were always in the library, right?

I was always in the library.

We never had a single book in our house, not even the Bible.

I don't know why.

We were Catholic, not even the Bible.

So my parents would have never spent money on books.

So I got that education for free.

I educated myself.

And I fell in love with literature, and I believe that literature really, really mattered.

And literature saved my life, and literature could save the world.

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