In Viet Thanh Nguyen's 'The Refugees,' wistfulness is an anthem of displacement

In a short time, Viet Thanh Nguyen has encircled the American literary consciousness: first with his mind-bending 2015 novel "The Sympathizer," then last year's cultural history "Nothing Ever Dies" and now with eight short stories entitled "The Refugees." Nguyen, the Aerol Arnold Chair of English and professor of English and American studies and ethnicity at USC, has called refugees "the zombies of the world" because they are haunted, unwanted at home and abroad. In "Black-Eyed Women," the first tale in his new collection, his characters do share such qualities with the undead. The narrator is a 38-year-old Vietnamese refugee, working as a ghostwriter and living in near silence with her mother. She leads a denatured American life -- her gender unclear until the ninth page.