DESCRIPTION

“A lyrical work of self-discovery that’s shockingly intimate and insistently universal…Not so much briefly gorgeous as permanently stunning.” —Ron Charles, The Washington Post

Poet Ocean Vuong’s debut novel is a shattering portrait of a family, a first love, and the redemptive power of storytelling

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family’s history that began before he was born — a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam — and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation. At once a witness to the fraught yet undeniable love between a single mother and her son, it is also a brutally honest exploration of race, class, and masculinity. Asking questions central to our American moment, immersed as we are in addiction, violence, and trauma, but undergirded by compassion and tenderness, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is as much about the power of telling one’s own story as it is about the obliterating silence of not being heard.

With stunning urgency and grace, Ocean Vuong writes of people caught between disparate worlds, and asks how we heal and rescue one another without forsaking who we are. The question of how to survive, and how to make of it a kind of joy, powers the most important debut novel of many years.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ocean Vuong is the author of the critically acclaimed poetry collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds, winner of the Whiting Award and the T.S. Eliot Prize. His writings have also been featured in The Atlantic, Harper's, The Nation, New Republic, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. Born in Saigon, Vietnam, he currently lives in Northampton, Massachusetts. On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is his first novel.

REVIEWS

An instant New York Times Bestseller!

Longlisted for the 2019 National Book Award for Fiction, the Carnegie Medal in Fiction, the 2019 Aspen Words Literacy Prize, and the PEN/Hemingway Debut Novel Award, Shortlisted for the 2019 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, Winner of the 2019 New England Book Award for Fiction

Named one of the most anticipated books of 2019 by Vulture, Entertainment Weekly, Buzzfeed, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, Oprah.com, Huffington Post, The A.V. Club, Nylon, The Week, The Rumpus, The Millions, The Guardian, Publishers Weekly, and more.

"Vuong writes about the yearning for connection that afflicts immigrants. But 'ocean' also describes the distinctive way Vuong writes: His words are liquid, flowing, rolling, teasing, mighty and overpowering. When Vuong's mother gave him the oh-so-apt name of Ocean, she inadvertently called into being a writer whose language some of us readers could happily drown in...Like so many immigrant writers before him, Vuong has taken the English he acquired with difficulty and not only made it his own -- he's made it better." --Maureen Corrigan, Fresh Air

"With his radical approach to form and his daring mix of personal reflection, historical recollection and sexual exploration, Vuong is surely a literary descendant of [Walt Whitman]. Emerging from the most marginalized circumstances, he has produced a lyrical work of self-discovery that's shockingly intimate and insistently universal...[The] narrative flows -- rushing from one anecdote to another, swirling past and present, constantly swelling with poignancy...Vuong ties the private terrors of supposedly inconsequential people to the larger forces pulsing through America...At times, the tension between Little Dog's passion and his concern seems to explode the very structure of traditional narrative, and the pages break apart into the lines of an evocative prose poem -- not so much briefly gorgeous as permanently stunning." --Ron Charles, Washington Post

"In order to survive, Little Dog has to receive and reject another kind of violence, too: he must see his mother through the American eyes that scan her for weakness and incompetence and, at best, disregard her, the way that evil spirits might ignore a child named for a little dog. There is a staggering tenderness in the way that Little Dog holds all of this within himself, absorbing it and refusing to pass it on. Reading 'On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous' can feel like watching an act of endurance art, or a slow, strange piece of magic in which bones become sonatas, to borrow one of Vuong's metaphors." --Jia Tolentino, The New Yorker

"Ocean Vuong's devastatingly beautiful first novel, as evocative as its title, is a painful but extraordinary coming-of-age story about surviving the aftermath of trauma...Vuong's language soars as he writes of beauty, survival, and freedom, which sometimes isn't freedom at all, but 'simply the cage widening far away from you, the bars abstracted with distance but still there'... The title says it: Gorgeous." --Heller McAlpin, NPR.org

"A stunningly written journey that...explores how race, masculinity, addiction and poverty are seen in our country--all topics that feel especially significant today." -- WSJ. Magazine

"Hands down, the book that carried me through the year was Ocean Vuong's On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous. I'm willing to bet this book carried legions of us, with the brutal and yet also tender beauty of the poetics, the intimacy between bodies, the weight of the heart suspended inside longing. This is a book that multiplies meanings, but at the center is a queer coming-of-age story as well as a bicultural family history. The shadow of a mother-son relationship and the shadow of the America-Vietnam relationship haunts the story. I fell in love with the narrator a hundred times over. I also felt suspended between the atomized mother who cannot fully understand the language of her son, a son's attempt to both inhabit as well as break free from his own family history, and the force of nature it takes to wrestle the gap. The language went into my body." --Lidia Yuknavitch