APSI Summer Book Club 2026: To Save and to Destroy

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 >>

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's Asian American and Diaspora Studies program.

Elsewhere, Eileen is Director of the Cheng Shewo Institute of Chinese Journalism at Shih Hsin University in Taipei, Taiwan, and she co-directs the Biographical Literature Press and its longstanding Chinese-language history journal, Biographical Literature. Eileen serves on the executive board of the LA Review of Books, and as co-editor of the Duke University Press book series, Sinotheory. Among Eileen’s ongoing collaborative projects this year include co-editing the Routledge Introduction to Modern and Contemporary East Asian Literature; serving as dramaturg for Jingqiu Guan's multimedia dance project on rail travel and the Asian diaspora; and also, with Mae Ngai (Columbia), editing the unpublished writings of pioneer Asian American author Louis Chu.

Eileen received her A.B. in Literature from Harvard (with academic sojourns at the Sorbonne, National Taiwan University, and the University of Perugia), and her Ph.D in Comparative Literature from Stanford.