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In ‘My Documents,' passive Americans accept their dystopian reality

In ‘My Documents,' passive Americans accept their dystopian reality

Washington Post09-04-2025

In a May 2000 essay for Essence magazine, Octavia Butler wrote that 'to try to foretell the future without studying history is like trying to learn to read without bothering to learn the alphabet.' History clearly inspires Kevin Nguyen's dystopian second novel, 'Mỹ Documents,' which imagines a near-future in which, following coordinated terrorist attacks by Vietnamese perpetrators, a million Vietnamese Americans are imprisoned in the same way Japanese Americans were during World War II.

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