The six essays in this profound collection by the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Sympathizer (Grove Press, 2015) were delivered originally as the prestigious Charles Eliot Norton Lectures and reflect on what the outsider means to literary writing. Nguyen explores the idea of being an outsider through literary, historical, political, and familial lenses. Considering the writers who influenced his writing, Nguyen investigates the works of Herman Melville, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ralph Ellison, William Carlos Williams, Maxine Hong Kingston, and others, while addressing concerns about the writer’s responsibility in a time of violence and the burdens and pleasures of the “minor” writer in society. “If my literary dreams began in the innocence of boyhood, with an uncomplicated love for enrapturing stories,” he writes, “my transformation into a writer was only possible through recognizing the complex power of stories and how they had shaped my own otherness, both the kind imposed on me by forces beyond my control and the otherness already hidden inside.”
