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| photo: Nam Phi Dang |
Vinh Nguyen is a writer, editor, and educator. He was born in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, and lives in Toronto, Canada. He has written or co-edited three previous books, including Lived Refuge. The Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse (Counterpoint, April 15) is his first creative work, blending fractured reminiscences, invented histories, and fictional fabulations to chase the truths of desire.
Handsell readers your book in 25 words or less:
A speculative memoir about a refugee's mysterious disappearance. I remember, re-imagine, and conjecture to reach the truths of desire and all that could have been.
On your nightstand now:
I'm currently reading Hassan Blasim's The Iraqi Christ. Damning, absurd, cerebrally poetic. Blasim is, in my opinion, the most exciting and serious writer of refugee narratives alive.
Favorite book when you were a child:
I didn't learn to read until I was 10 years old. Growing up in refugee camps, I spent my time mostly roaming around and playing with other children. It was a struggle when I entered school in Canada. Unlike many other writers I know, reading was never a source of comfort in childhood. Instead, I dreaded having to "study," to acquire new words and then to use them. I wanted only to watch Hong Kong martial arts serials dubbed into Vietnamese and dream of different worlds than the strange one I had to live in.
Your top five authors:
I love and admire so many authors, so let's just say this is one of many top fives!
Monique Truong's entire oeuvre is a treasure. The Book of Salt bowled me over when I first read it, and it still remains one of the best.
Bryan Washington is a virtuoso of writing the unsaid. In deceptively simple sentences, he layers so much complexity and absence, tension and emotion. The Japanese mother in Memorial is divine.
Virginia Woolf did things with the English language that no one else could. Mrs. Dalloway is a book that continues to shock in its aliveness.
Margaret Laurence is an underrated Canadian gem. I read her Manawaka series in one summer and it changed the way I understood everyday life in the prairies.
Rawi Hage is another underrated writer. His work is full of piercing intelligence and darkly comic storytelling. De Niro's Game is one of the most pulsing accounts of living in war I've ever read.
Book you're an evangelist for:
Every term, I teach F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. I know it's a conventional choice, but my undergrad students and I have the most exciting conversations about suspense, narration, and craft. Recently, a student became obsessed with the book; she wrote a brilliant analysis of the book, as well as her own fan fiction, and came to my office one day to excitedly show off the Gatsby phone case she'd made! It was one of my proudest moments. Also, I recommended the book to a friend this year, and it helped her figure out the structure of her novel. Fitzgerald is such an amazing stylist!
Book you've bought for the cover:
Almost every book? I love beautiful covers. I do judge a book by its cover. There's a small press in Nova Scotia, Gaspereau Press, that prints the most gorgeous books. Their covers have beautiful typesetting and are very arrestingly graphic in their simplicity.
Book you hid from your parents:
Hiding books was not a thing. We are not a family of readers. My mother was happy to see me read anything because it meant I was "learning." One time, I did pick up a used book of gay erotica, but I hid that from everyone, including myself.
Book that changed your life:
Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina had a profound impact on me. I don't remember how or why I picked up this book, but I read it in my late teens, and it taught me that love is complicated, that others will not always understand the difficult decisions one has to make to forge one's own happiness. To love someone is often to hurt them too. I cried for days. This book gifted me tenderness.
Favorite line from a book:
This question is a tough one. It's hard to choose a favorite line, but for now it would have to be this:
"One of those life histories that had to be toned down to avoid straining belief. (Readers would be amazed how often writers do this.)" --Sigrid Nunez, The Friend
Five books you'll never part with:
I have a soft spot for stories of children left to fend for themselves, to discover the world through the eyes of crumbling innocence, and Lois-Ann Yamanaka's Blu's Hanging made me cry at every sentence. I don't know how Kazuo Ishiguro does it, but in Never Let Me Go he manages to bring so much--friendship, ethics, nostalgia, memory, selfhood--into a crystalline and unforgettable narrative. I picked up Jeanette Winterson's Sexing the Cherry at a book exchange while I was backpacking in my 20s and it was the perfect book to journey with. Michael Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion is a magical history of Toronto, the city I've decided to call home. Nguyễn Du's 19th-century long poem The Tale of Kiều is Vietnam's national epic; it's the enduring story of my homeland.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
I want to read Maggie O'Farrell's Hamnet for the first time again and again. To luxuriate in the sensuousness of her prose and to arrive at that gorgeous ending, the only natural ending that the story could've had and yet so surprising and so freshly profound. I think it's such a perfect book.
"Like many Canadian authors, my career has depended on indie bookstores. But more than that: I love them as a reader. Indie bookstores are havens of taste, flavor, intelligence, and warmth. There is no force in the world better at getting the right book into the hands of a reader that is going to love it than a personal recommendation from a passionate bookseller. Thank you all."
Located at 1937 N. Martin Luther King Jr. Dr., Niche Book Bar first opened its doors in a limited capacity late last year. Since then, owner has been filling the shelves, expanding hours, and hosting events. Per On Milwaukee, it is the city's first Black- and female-owned bookstore since the Reader's Choice closed in 2017.
In a social media post announcing the decision, Sally Morgan wrote: "
A new Reading Agency report, State of the Nation in Adult Reading 2025, has 
Bookseller moment: Posted on Facebook Wednesday by 
Sisters and novelists Anne Berest and Claire Berest are touring the U.S. for their new novel, Gabriële (Europa Editions), which tells the forgotten story of their extraordinary great-grandmother, Gabriële Buffet-Picabia. In Boston, Mass., they visited 
The Fearrington bakers have been busy helping 
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Adult Children of Borderline Parents: A Trauma-Informed Guide to Recover from a Toxic Childhood and Discover a Healthy Sense of Self
The Argentinian cartoonist Joaquín Salvador Lavado Tejón (1932-2020), who published as Quino, introduced the brilliantly insightful, refreshingly unfiltered six-year-old Mafalda in 1964. Quino ended his internationally renowned black-and-white comic strip, available in 26 languages, in 1973. Now Elsewhere Editions, the children's imprint of Archipelago Books, is releasing Mafalda: Book One--with four additional volumes planned, all translated by lauded Frank Wynne--and the delightfully precocious Mafalda deserves prominent space on anyone's shelves.