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The Refugees
- Narrated by: Viet Thanh Nguyen
- Length: 5 hrs and 5 mins
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Publisher's summary
Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Sympathizer was one of the most widely and highly praised novels of 2015, the winner not only of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, but also the Center for Fiction Debut Novel Prize, the Edgar Award for Best First Novel, the ALA Carnegie Medal for Fiction, the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, and the California Book Award for First Fiction. Nguyen's next fiction book, The Refugees, is a collection of perfectly formed stories written over a period of 20 years, exploring questions of immigration, identity, love, and family.
With the coruscating gaze that informed The Sympathizer, in The Refugees Viet Thanh Nguyen gives voice to lives led between two worlds, the adopted homeland and the country of birth. From a young Vietnamese refugee who suffers profound culture shock when he comes to live with two gay men in San Francisco, to a woman whose husband is suffering from dementia and starts to confuse her for a former lover, to a girl living in Ho Chi Minh City whose older half sister comes back from America having seemingly accomplished everything she never will, the stories are a captivating testament to the dreams and hardships of immigration.
The second piece of fiction by a major new voice in American letters, The Refugees is a beautifully written and sharply observed book about the aspirations of those who leave one country for another and the relationships and desires for self-fulfillment that define our lives.
Critic reviews
Featured Article: The Best Short Story Audiobooks to Immerse Yourself In Now
Short stories have had a huge impact on the canon of great literature. In fact, some of history's most revered novelists—Ernest Hemingway, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Louisa May Alcott among them—wrote short stories, which make excellent introductions to their work. Plus, these bite-size listens are the perfect way to get a big dose of literary inspiration even when you’re short on time. To get you started, we’ve compiled a list of listens.
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Story
The “best short story writer in English” (Time) is back with a masterful collection that explores ideas of power, ethics, and justice, and cuts to the very heart of what it means to live in community with our fellow humans. With his trademark prose—wickedly funny, unsentimental, and perfectly tuned—Saunders continues to challenge and surprise: here is a collection of prismatic, deeply resonant stories that encompass joy and despair, oppression and revolution, bizarre fantasy and brutal reality.
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Extraordinary
- By REBECCA on 10-18-22
By: George Saunders
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Some People Need Killing
- A Memoir of Murder in My Country
- By: Patricia Evangelista
- Narrated by: Patricia Evangelista
- Length: 11 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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Journalist Patricia Evangelista came of age in the aftermath of a street revolution that forged a new future for the Philippines. Three decades later, in the face of mounting inequality, the nation discovered the fragility of its democratic institutions under the regime of strongman Rodrigo Duterte.
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Great book
- By Brecht on 05-28-24
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1Q84
- By: Haruki Murakami, Jay Rubin - translator, Philip Gabriel - translator
- Narrated by: Allison Hiroto, Marc Vietor, Mark Boyett
- Length: 46 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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The year is 1984 and the city is Tokyo.
A young woman named Aomame follows a taxi driver's enigmatic suggestion and begins to notice puzzling discrepancies in the world around her. She has entered, she realizes, a parallel existence, which she calls 1Q84 - "Q" is for "question mark". A world that bears a question....
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WOW, WOW, WOW.
- By Amanda on 11-06-11
By: Haruki Murakami, and others
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The Poet X
- By: Elizabeth Acevedo
- Narrated by: Elizabeth Acevedo
- Length: 3 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Xiomara Batista feels unheard and unable to hide in her Harlem neighborhood. Ever since her body grew into curves, she has learned to let her fists and her fierceness do the talking. But Xiomara has plenty she wants to say, and she pours all her frustration and passion onto the pages of a leather notebook, reciting the words to herself like prayers - especially after she catches feelings for a boy in her bio class named Aman, whom her family can never know about.
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Better
- By KSS on 01-09-19
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There There
- A Novel
- By: Tommy Orange
- Narrated by: Darrell Dennis, Shaun Taylor-Corbett, Alma Ceurvo, and others
- Length: 8 hrs
- Unabridged
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Jacquie Red Feather is newly sober and trying to make it back to the family she left behind in shame. Dene Oxendene is pulling his life back together after his uncle's death and has come to work at the powwow to honor his uncle's memory. Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield has come to watch her nephew Orvil, who has taught himself traditional Indian dance through YouTube videos and will perform in public for the very first time. There will be glorious communion and a spectacle of sacred tradition and pageantry. And there will be sacrifice, and heroism, and loss.
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Highly recommend.
- By Rachel S on 07-09-18
By: Tommy Orange
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What listeners say about The Refugees
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Samuel Freire
- 04-22-19
Majestic writing
Captivating stories that grasped my attention from the beginning to the end. This is the second book that I have listened from this author and again I am impressed with his writing style.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Brenda B
- 09-25-17
Remarkable and unforgettable
I bought this as a Daily Deal or other sale, with no idea about the author. I don't even care for short stories but these blew me away. I couldn't stop listening. The characters were so well developed I could see them as if looking at a photo but felt as though I was in each scene, embodying the characters. They had the mark of all great fiction. Each story was rooted in some aspect of the Vietnamese American experience, so I had access to an unknown culture. And yet each spoke to the universal bitter sweetness of being human, poignant stories of dreams dashed and realized , love and loss, the wreckage of human failure. So beautifully read by the author . Couldn't recommend this more highly. In fact this is the only review I've ever written! Can't wait to read his Pulitzer Prize winning novel.
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- Thomas More
- 03-19-17
Good collection of short stories
After reading his award-winning The Sympathizer, I wanted to follow it up by looking at some more stories from Viet Thanh Nguyen. The Refugees is a collection of eight or nine stories that saw original publication in order sources. After the success of The Sympathizer, his publisher brought these works together into this collection. All the stories feature Vietnamese characters and are set either in America as immigrant tales, or in Vietnam, as is the case with the last story of the collection featuring a father who receives a visit from a daughter who has "made it big" in the states as a pediatrician. Themes such as aging, young love, regret, and deceit work strongly throughout the collection. All of the stories are excellent and help to illuminate the lives of Vietnamese immigrants.
The author narrates the collection himself, and as is often the case with such things (SEE "The Lovely Bones," as an example) the results are good, but not great. Great narration is an art in itself, and sometimes the best idea is to bring in a hired gun for the job.
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47 people found this helpful
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- H. Easom
- 05-22-18
Some More Engaging than Others
A beautifully written book of short stories, I enjoyed some immensely and others not so much. The first chapter was my least favorite; I’m glad I stuck it out, as some of the later chapters really engaged my interest.
As an audiobook, Chapter 1 was a bit confusing. The author narrated the stories, and it took me a while to recognize that the story’s narrator was actually female. This threw me off. The author also made a valiant effort to speak in the accents of the character speaking. In some instances it worked gorgeously; in others, not so much.
Overall, an enjoyable listen.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Naila
- 01-21-18
Sensitive
Written with a certain cultural and aesthetic sensitivity that I have not encountered in modern refugee literature. It offers a perspective that gives another perspective, sometimes of those who never left.
Some stories are more captivating than others. Some dragged a little
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1 person found this helpful
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- Amazon Customer
- 09-20-17
Read it, but don't listen to it.
The narration is too monotone. Key moments in stories shoot by since not much inflection is used.
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- ssk
- 11-21-23
Excellent
Intriguing stories full of touching details and memorable portrayals of Vietnamese refugees, old, young, confident, reticent, rigid amd flexible but always realistic and memorable. i loved it!
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- James Matichuk
- 09-20-19
great refugee stories
A series of short stories about vietnamese refugees. Engaging story telling and varied. I liked it
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2 people found this helpful
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- P Proffer
- 02-19-18
An interesting combination of stories.
It was a very heartfelt combination of stories and I was surprised that I enjoyed it very much.
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- just asking for some common sense
- 09-09-17
Excellent collection of stories
I don't normally but collections of short stories, but I bought this at the same time as I bought one of his books. I haven't listened to the book yet, but if it's as good as the stories I know I'll like it. He also narrates the book and I did enjoy the narration. If course now I always listen to an audio sample and I don't buy books if I don't like the sound of the narrator's voice.
The reason that I like this so much is that almost every story left me wanting more. Almost all the main characters could be fleshed out in novel length and I would be interested in that novel.
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