APSI Summer Book Club 2026: To Save and to Destroy

Event details Date: Monday, August 17, 2026 Time: 9:00 AM to 10:30 AM Location: Online Type: Lecture / Workshop About this event APSI's summer book club is back by popular demand. This year, the books have been chosen to set the stage for APSI's annual keynote talk (November 2026) which will feature author and professor Viet Thanh Nguyen. Professor Eileen Cheng-yin Chow (Duke) concludes our two-book sequence with Nguyen's newest book, To Save and to Destroy, which was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. The discussion will take place online, so members of the community near and far are welcome to join. Be sure to register via Zoom (https://duke.zoom.us/meeting/register/0zQgAwqnRFai8lhl1I8x-g) From the publisher The essays here, delivered originally as the prestigious Norton Lectures, proffer a new answer to a classic literary question: What does the outsider mean to literary writing? Over the course of six captivating and moving chapters, Nguyen explores the idea of being an outsider through lenses that are, by turns, literary, historical, political, and familial. Each piece moves between writers who influenced Nguyen's craft and weaves in the haunting story of his late mother's mental illness. Nguyen unfolds the novels and nonfiction of Herman Melville, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ralph Ellison, William Carlos Williams, and Maxine Hong Kingston, until aesthetic theories give way to pressing concerns raised by war and politics. What is a writer's responsibility in a time of violence? Should we celebrate fiction that gives voice to the voiceless-or do we confront the forces that render millions voiceless in the first place? What are the burdens and pleasures of the "minor" writer in any society? Unsatisfied with the modest inclusion accorded to "model minorities" such as Asian Americans, Nguyen sets the agenda for a more radical and disquieting solidarity with those whose lives have been devastated by imperialism and forever wars. About the moderator Eileen Cheng-yin Chow is Associate Professor of the Practice in Chinese and Japanese Cultural Studies at Duke University, and one of the founding directors of Story Lab at Duke. She is Director of Graduate Studies for APSI and a founding/core faculty member of Duke Asian American and Diaspora Studies program. Official event details: https://asianpacific.duke.edu/event/apsi-summer-book-club-2026-save-and-destroy-08-17-2026/