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VIET THANH NGUYEN explores what it means to be an outsider

- ERIN VANDERHOOF

IN DECEMBER 2023, Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen had something he felt needed to be said and, luckily, a platform of unusual gravity on which to say it. Earlier that year he was tapped to give the Norton Lectures, a nearly century-long Harvard series in which an artist addresses the public six times over the course of a year. This April, Nguyen will release To Save and to Destroy: Writing as an Other, an edited compilation of the lectures, preserving their piercing insight into the dilemmas faced by outsiders working in an insider literary culture.