winterlily
Written on Mar 12, 2021
A New York Times bestseller • Nominated for the National Book Award for Fiction • Ocean Vuong’s debut novel is a shattering portrait of a family, a first love, and the redemptive power of storytelling
New York Times Readers Pick: 100 Best Books of the 21st Century
“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
“This is one of the best novels I’ve ever read...Ocean Vuong is a master. This book a masterpiece.”—Tommy Orange, author of There There and Wandering Stars
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.
Named a Best Book of the Year by:
GQ, Kirkus Reviews, Booklist, Library Journal, TIME, Esquire, The Washington Post, Apple, Good Housekeeping, The New Yorker, The New York Public Library, Elle.com, The Guardian, The A.V. Club, NPR, Lithub, Entertainment Weekly, Vogue.com, The San Francisco Chronicle, Mother Jones, Vanity Fair, The Wall Street Journal Magazine, and more!
- ISBN10 0525562044
- ISBN13 9780525562047
- Publish Date 1 June 2021 (first published 4 June 2019)
- Publish Status Active
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Penguin Books
- Format Paperback (US Trade)
- Pages 256
- Language English
- URL https://penguinrandomhouse.com/books/isbn/9780525562047
Reviews
Bianca
Written on Jun 5, 2020
It's true that, in Vietnamese, we rarely say I love you, and when we do, it is almost always in English. Care and love, for us, are pronounced clearest through service: plucking white hairs, pressing yourself on your son to absorb a plane's turbulence and, therefore, his fear. Or now—as Lan called to me, "Little Dog, get over here and help me help your mother." And we knelt on each side of you, rolling out the hardened cords in your upper arms, then down to your wrists, your fingers. For a moment almost too brief to matter, this made sense—that three people on the floor connected to each other by touch, made something like the word family.
Beautiful prose, no doubt. But for a personal story, I felt like the writing was way too flashy. Maybe it’s my personal preference, but I like books that can be raw and vulnerable without having to use so much grandeur in its prose. And it just felt really disjointed and felt like a compilation of short stories instead of a novel. I really tried to like this and give it more stars, but I just didn’t have the heart to. I liked some passages, but the book as a whole honestly didn’t really move me.
jamiereadthis
Written on Jun 6, 2019
Some books aren’t so much reading as they are listening to what the author is putting on the page. This was gorgeous and painful and gorgeous.