Our editors listened to a podcast about Indigenous resistance, watched a film about Palestinian climbers, and checked a few more books off of our reading lists
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Rickie Lee Jones cuts right to the chase on the first page of the introduction to “Last Chance Texaco: Chronicles of an American Troubadour,” her well-crafted and intensely candid new memoir.
Its second paragraph reads: “
When I was twenty-three years old I drove around L.A. with Tom Waits. We’d cruise along Highway 1 in his new 1963 Thunderbird. With my blonde hair flying out the window and both of us sweating in the summer sun, the alcohol seeped from our pores and the sex smell still soaked our clothes and our hair. We liked our smell. We did not bathe as often as we might have. We were in love and I for one was not interested in washing any of that off. By the end of summer we were exchanging song ideas. We were also exchanging something deeper. Each other.”
The Pulitzer Prize winner will read from his long-awaited sequel,
The Committed, on April 12.
By
Margaret Carmel
4/9/2021 at 11:10am
Viet Thanh Nguyen isnât done flipping the script.Â
In 2016, the Vietnamese American author burst onto the literary scene with his debut, Pulitzer Prize-winning novel,Â
The Sympathizer. The book caught worldwide attention for its blend of literary fiction with a gripping spy story, set against the political intrigue of the Vietnam War. Its protagonist, who remains nameless, tells his story in the form of a forced confession of his acts as a Northern Vietnamese spy embedded with a South Vietnamese general.Â