Pages from the Textbook of Alternate History: New Book From Phong Nguyen

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At critical moments in world history, every political, spiritual, and cultural leader foresaw a different destiny. Columbus planned a Western sea route to Asia; Hitler applied to art school twice; Joan of Arc prophesied that she would become a mother. It is out of their failures that history itself is made. But what if the history-makers succeeded in the fulfillment of their best-laid plans? In Pages from the Textbook of Alternate History, Phong Nguyen explores a myriad of pasts in which these icons of history made a different choice, and got what they wished for.

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In Phong Nguyen’s debut collection, Memory Sickness and Other Stories (Elixir Press, 2011), the author explored the lives of the marginalized in Providence, Rhode Island. In the title story, a former child soldier tries to readjust to life in his new country. Yet he refuses to complete his story: “I don’t ever talk about what happened after the monsoon, because the things I remember are not the things that people talk about,” he says. “…And because someday I might have to escape again, and I do not want you to know how I can be caught.” It is at once an acknowledgement of another story and the withholding of it.

In his new book, Pages from the Text Book of Alternate History (Queen Ferry Press), Nguyen promises to do the opposite: to give us more stories, alternate stories:

At critical moments in world history, every political, spiritual, and cultural leader foresaw a different destiny. Columbus planned a Western sea route to Asia; Hitler applied to art school twice; Joan of Arc prophesied that she would become a mother. It is out of their failures that history itself is made. But what if the history-makers succeeded in the fulfillment of their best-laid plans? In Pages from the Textbook of Alternate History, Phong Nguyen explores a myriad of pasts in which these icons of history made a different choice, and got what they wished for.

The starting point of these stories is “What If…,” yet it is also the re-imagining of history as it is taught. As Nguyen writes: “the story-collection we call ‘history’ are comforting myths, and the only way to get an inkling of the truth from them is to seek so many alternative accounts and to measure the validity of each. What I call for the purposes of this book an ‘Alternate History’ is actually a counter-myth to the myth we accept.”

It’s an audacious project of great imagination, one that has already garnered much acclaim. Dan Chaon calls it “alternately poetic and spooky, heartbreaking and hilarious, a profound examination of the way the past has shaped us.” Matt Bell writes, “Smart and witty, these stories deliver one after another, each reopening the eternal questions of how we got to be who we are, of where we came from and where we might go next.”

Watch the book trailer below or click here.

Buy the book from Queen Ferry Press, here.

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Phong Nguyen is the author of Memory Sickness and Other Stories (Elixir Press, 2011) and Pages from the Textbook of Alternate History (Queen’s Ferry Press, 2014). He is co-editor of Pleiades and Pleiades Press, for which he edited the volume Nancy Hale: On the Life and Work of a Lost American Master with the author Dan Chaon. His stories have been published in more than 30 literary journals including Agni, Boulevard, Chattahoochee Review, Florida Review, Iowa Review, Massachusetts Review, Mississippi Review, New Ohio Review, North American Review, and Texas Review. He is an Associate Professor at the University of Central Missouri, where he teaches creative writing and directs the Pleiades Visiting Writers Series. He currently lives in Warrensburg, Missouri with his wife– the artist Sarah Nguyen– and their three sons.

Eric Nguyen has a degree in sociology from the University of Maryland along with a certificate in LGBT Studies. He is currently an MFA candidate at McNeese State University and lives in Louisiana.

                                                                                                                                                                             

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