Uploaded April 2025 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
Celebrate the book release of Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen’s new collection of moving essays, "To Save and to Destroy: On Writing as an Other," in conversation with bestselling author, essayist, and UC Riverside professor Charmaine Craig.
Through an unflinchingly personal meditation on the literary forms of otherness, Nguyen explores the idea of being an outsider through lenses that are literary, historical, political, and familial. These essays—originally delivered as the prestigious Norton Lectures—offer a new answer to a classic literary question: What does the outsider mean to literary writing?
Celebrate the book release of Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen’s new collection of moving essays, "To Save and to Destroy: On Writing as an Other," in conversation with bestselling author, essayist, and UC Riverside professor Charmaine Craig.
Through an unflinchingly personal meditation on the literary forms of otherness, Nguyen explores the idea of being an outsider through lenses that are literary, historical, political, and familial. These essays—originally delivered as the prestigious Norton Lectures—offer a new answer to a classic literary question: What does the outsider mean to literary writing?
