A writer and editor in pursuit of urgent and enduring stories. He works across fiction and journalism.
Based in Brooklyn, NY.
About/Contact
A writer and editor in pursuit of urgent and enduring stories. He works across fiction and journalism.
Based in Brooklyn, NY.
About/Contact
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Sarah Jean Grimm
Mỹ Documents
April 8, 2025
One World/Penguin Random House
Pre-order on Bookshop
A moving speculative novel about a Vietnamese American family confronting ambition and assimilation during exceptionally troubled times, Mỹ Documents gives us a version of reality only a few degrees away from our own. Nguyen, whose work grew from extensive research on the incarceration of Japanese citizens in the U.S. during the 1940s, imagines what a mass detention program might look like in the age of the internet.
When the U.S. government begins detaining Vietnamese Americans amid a wave of national panic, half-siblings Ursula, Alvin, Jen, and Duncan find themselves coming of age during a harsh new reality. While Ursula fosters a nascent career in journalism and Alvin interns at Google, Jen and Duncan are forced into the unforgiving confines of Camp Tacoma, a chilling echo of America’s internment camps.
When Ursula begins to use her detained siblings as a rare source of insider information about the camps, her career skyrockets and she is forced to contend with what it means that her success has come at the cost of her own family. As all four siblings have their lives upended, they must adapt to their strained realities and search for a way back to each other.
Praise for Mỹ Documents
“A sharp riveting story of a Vietnamese American detention camp set in an alternate future. Funny, powerful, and propulsive ... Mỹ Documents is a moving portrait of the kind of people we become when we are trying to survive.” — Cathy Park Hong, author of Minor Feelings
“Drawing from the past to portray a reality that feels terrifyingly possible, Mỹ Documents enthralls and unsettles with every page. This was a relentlessly gripping read, by turns wry and wise, barbed with dark humor. Through one family’s struggle to survive and speak truthfully about their experiences, the book lays bare how love, ambition, and ethics often muddle the story—and just how high the stakes are for getting it right.”
— Jenny Xie, author of Holding Pattern and a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree
New Waves
March 10, 2020
One World/Penguin Random House
Order on Bookshop
Lucas and Margo are fed up. Margo is a brilliant programmer tired of being talked over as the company's sole black employee, and while Lucas is one of many Asians at the firm, he's nearly invisible as a low-paid customer service rep. Together, they decide to steal their tech startup's user database in an attempt at revenge. The heist takes a sudden turn when Margo dies in a car accident, and Lucas is left reeling, wondering what to do with their secret—and wondering whether her death really was an accident. When Lucas hacks into Margo's computer looking for answers, he is drawn into her private online life and realizes just how little he knew about his best friend.
With a fresh voice, biting humor, and piercing observations about human nature, Kevin Nguyen brings an insider's knowledge of the tech industry to this imaginative novel. A pitch-perfect exploration of race and startup culture, secrecy and surveillance, social media and friendship, New Waves asks: How well do we really know one another? And how do we form true intimacy and connection in a tech-obsessed world?
Praise for New Waves
One of the best books of 2020 — NPR, New York Public Library, Parade, Kirkus
“Nguyen’s own attempts to infuse New Waves with politics, heart and reality are admirable. He captures beautifully the subtle strains of being disenfranchised, poor and lonely in New York.”
— New York Times Book Review
“New Waves manages to be both knowing and cutting, a satire of internet culture that is also a moving portrait of a lost human being.”
— Los Angeles Times
“While satirizing the tech world’s social mores, Nguyen also unearths the biases that govern our digital infrastructure, which are omnipresent in everything from the algorithm behind Pac-Man to the underpinnings of surveillance technology.“
— The New Yorker