January 13- 15 The Thacker Mountain Radio Hour is proud to welcome author, Viet Thanh Nguyen and his new novel, The Committed. The book is the sequel to his previous novel, The Sympathizer, which won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Our musical guests will include the 2019 Blues Awards’ Female Soul-Blues Singer of the Year, Annika Chambers plus acoustic roots guitar virtuoso, Nathan Salsburg.
Hosts: Jim Dees and our house band, the Yalobushwhackers
Air times:
Saturday, January 15– 7pm (CT) Mississippi Public Broadcasting
9pm (CT) Alabama Public Radio
3pm (ET) University of Tennessee at Chattanooga
Thursdays 6pm (CT) WUMS – University of Mississippi
Fridays 9am (CT) WYXR Memphis Community Radio
Viet Thanh Nguyen is the author of The Committed (Grove Atlantic) his long-awaited follow-up to his Pulitzer Prize-winning, The Sympathizer, which has sold more than one million copies worldwide.
The Committed follows the “man of two minds” as he arrives in Paris in the early 1980s with his blood brother Bon. The pair try to overcome their pasts and ensure their futures by engaging in capitalism in one of its purest forms: drug dealing.
But the new life he is making has perils he has not foreseen, whether the self-torture of addiction, the authoritarianism of a state locked in a colonial mindset, or the seeming paradox of how to reunite his two closest friends whose worldviews put them in absolute opposition.
Viet Thanh Nguyen was born in Vietnam and raised in America. He is the author of The Sympathizer, which was awarded the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction alongside seven other prizes. He is also the author of the short story collection The Refugees, the nonfiction book Nothing Ever Dies, a finalist for the National Book Award, and is the editor of an anthology of refugee writing, The Displaced. He lives in Los Angeles.
Annika Chambers is a soul/blues singer from Houston, Texas who won the 2019 Female Soul Blues Artist of the Year award at the Blues Music Awards. Her most recent album is Kiss My Sass (Vizztone Records).
Chambers’ singing talent was discovered during her seven years in the armed services when she toured Kosovo and Iraq and sang for a military ceremony. Her debut album, Making My Mark (2014) reached #16 on the Living Blues chart. Her second album, Wild and Free (2016), debuted at number seven on the Billboard Blues chart.
Nathan Salsburg is a guitarist, composer, archivist and writer living in Kentucky. He is a frequent collaborator of songwriter-singer Joan Shelley, occasional guitar-duo partner of James Elkington, and has contributed to recordings by Bonnie “Prince” Billy, the Weather Station, and Jake Xerxes Fussell, among others. Salsburg is also curator of the digital Alan Lomax Archive.
His most recent releases include the EPs, Landwerk No. 1 and 2; the single Second Moon, and the full-length album, Third.
