Manifesto: On Never Giving Up

Posted in Autobiography, Books, Media Archive, Monographs, United Kingdom on 2022-02-15 21:30Z by Steven

Manifesto: On Never Giving Up

Grove Atlantic
2022-01-18
240 pages
5.5″ x 8.25″
Hardcover ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-5890-1
eBook ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-5891-8

Bernardine Evaristo

From the bestselling and Booker Prize-winning author of Girl, Woman, Other, Bernardine Evaristo’s memoir of her own life and writing, and her manifesto on unstoppability, creativity, and activism

Bernardine Evaristo’s 2019 Booker Prize win was an historic and revolutionary occasion. The first Black woman and first Black British person ever to win the prize, Evaristo’s breathtaking Girl, Woman, Other was dubbed “godlike in its scope and insight” by the Washington Post, named a favorite book by President Obama, Roxane Gay, and countless other readers, and translated into thirty-five languages.

Evaristo’s nonfiction debut, Manifesto, is an intimate and inspirational account of Evaristo’s life and career as she rebelled against the mainstream to fight to bring her creative work into the world. She recalls her childhood and teenaged years as a young actor and playwright in London, details her early political awakenings and activism, and recounts her determination to tell stories that were absent in the literary world around her. In her over three decades of centering the stories and histories of Black Britons, Evaristo refused to let any barriers stand in her way. In Manifesto, she charts her theory of unstoppability, and explains how she broke with convention to achieve fulfillment both artistic and personal. Drawing deeply on her own varied experiences and the people who have inspired her, Evaristo offers a vital contribution to conversations around race, class, feminism, sexuality, and aging.

Manifesto is a unique inspiration to us all to persist in doing work that we believe in, even when we might feel overlooked or discounted, following in Evaristo’s footsteps, from first vision, to continued perseverance, to eventual triumph.

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The Sympathizer

Posted in Asian Diaspora, Books, Novels on 2016-11-02 18:10Z by Steven

The Sympathizer

Grove Press
April 2015
384 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0802123459
Paperback ISBN: 978-0802124944

Viet Thanh Nguyen

  • Winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
  • Winner of the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction
  • Winner of the 2015 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize
  • Winner of the 2016 Edgar Award for Best First Novel
  • Winner of the 2015 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize
  • Winner of the 2015-2016 Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature (Adult Fiction)
  • Winner of the 2016 California Book Award for First Fiction

Named a Best Book of the Year by the New York Times Book ReviewWall Street JournalWashington Post, Seattle Times, Daily BeastKansas City StarLibrary JournalKirkus ReviewsPublishers WeeklyBooklist, GuardianNational PostMPR News, Amazon, Slate, FlavorwireEntropy, Quartz, and Globe and Mail

A profound, startling, and beautifully crafted debut novel, The Sympathizer is the story of a man of two minds, someone whose political beliefs clash with his individual loyalties. In dialogue with but diametrically opposed to the narratives of the Vietnam War that have preceded it, this novel offers an important and unfamiliar new perspective on the war: that of a conflicted communist sympathizer.

It is April 1975, and Saigon is in chaos. At his villa, a general of the South Vietnamese army is drinking whiskey and, with the help of his trusted captain, drawing up a list of those who will be given passage aboard the last flights out of the country. The general and his compatriots start a new life in Los Angeles, unaware that one among their number, the captain, is secretly observing and reporting on the group to a higher-up in the Viet Cong. The Sympathizer is the story of this captain: a man brought up by an absent French father and a poor Vietnamese mother, a man who went to university in America, but returned to Vietnam to fight for the Communist cause. Viet Thanh Nguyen’s astonishing novel takes us inside the mind of this double agent, a man whose lofty ideals necessitate his betrayal of the people closest to him. A gripping spy novel, an astute exploration of extreme politics, and a moving love story, The Sympathizer explores a life between two worlds and examines the legacy of the Vietnam War in literature, film, and the wars we fight today.

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