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Hardcover
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9780525562023
Overview
Overview
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. "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.
- Format: Hardcover
- Author: Vuong, Ocean
- ISBN: 9780525562023
- Condition: Used
- Dimensions: 8.50 x 0.90
- Number Of Pages: 256
- Publication Year: 2019
Customer Reviews
Rating Snapshot
5 ★
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Beautiful
Emmalyn N. - 5 years 5 months agothis book is truly gorgeous. and its effect on you isn't brief, it'll stick with you forever.
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Everyone Should Read This Book!
Cameo H. - 5 years 5 months agoBeautiful book. So happy to have received it. #SpringPicks
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Poetic Intersectionality at its Finest!
Caelie O. - 6 years agoI picked this book up for a class and I'm so grateful the professor put it on the reading list. The writing is phenomenal, so visceral and beautiful. The story is heart-wrenching but needs to be told-- for immigrants, for the impoverished, for the LGBTQ+ community, for anyone on the edges. Easy to devour and hard to forget.
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A truly seismic and essential first novel
Nicholas C. - 6 years 4 months agoThis is unlike anything I've ever read before--poetic prose and a completely wonderful, unique, and under-heard voice in English language literature. You can tell that Ocean Vuong is a poet, yes, but more deeply, you can tell he is deeply human, and you are the better for it. Raw, emotional, moving, beautiful. A must read.