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On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous: A Novel Hardcover – June 4, 2019

by Ocean Vuong (Author)

4.3 19,118 ratings

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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.

“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.

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!

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Popular Highlights in this book

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Because freedom, I am told, is nothing but the distance between the hunter and its prey.
Highlighted by 9,170 Kindle readers
To be gorgeous, you must first be seen, but to be seen allows you to be hunted.
Highlighted by 7,642 Kindle readers
To be a monster is to be a hybrid signal, a lighthouse: both shelter and warning at once.
Highlighted by 6,689 Kindle readers
When does a war end? When can I say your name and have it mean only your name and not what you left behind?
Highlighted by 5,999 Kindle readers

From the Publisher

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

An Amazon Best Book of June 2019:There is an immediacy to On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous that almost feels unique. The author Ocean Vuong was first published as a poet, and the poetry in this novel—present in the language, in the images and ideas—is unforgettable. The narrator is a young man in his late twenties, nicknamed Little Dog by his family, who is composing a long letter to his Vietnamese mother. Little Dog and his family grew up poor in Hartford, Connecticut, but their struggles do not end there. His mother still carries the burden of the war, as does his grandmother, and Little Dog’s struggles reach not only back to the traumas of Vietnam but forward in his efforts to fit in to a world that sees him as other. Eventually, he does find some solace in an ill-fated relationship with an older “redneck” boy, but that is only temporary. What is permanent is his desire to write, and of course his family. Vuong almost seems to be trying to super inject imagery, emotion, and language into every page, and to great effect; but no writer can reach absolute perfection. There are soaring moments in this novel, many of them. There will also be moments (although they will disagree on which ones) where readers feel that the writing fails. That’s how great art is made.—Chris Schluep, Amazon Book Review

Review

“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, Vogue

“To read On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is to experience a beginning again and again. It is to see the world as an open field, full of possibility.” —Rumpus

"A riot of feeling and sensation…delirious and star-bright…Vuong is pushing the boundaries of the novel form, reshaping the definition to fit the contours of his restless poetic exploration, using language to capture consciousness and being. The text spasms with memory like synapses firing in the dark…To read this book is to fill your whole life with it, albeit not briefly. Vuong’s is poetry that lingers in the blood long after the words have run out.” —Barbara VanDenburgh, USA Today

“Vuong is masterly at creating indelible, impressionistic images…Vuong beautifully evokes [Trevor’s] seductive power over Little Dog: This is some of the most moving writing I’ve read about two boys experimenting together…The book is brilliant in the way it pays attention not to what our thoughts make us feel, but to what our feelings make us think. To what kinds of truth does feeling lead? Oscar Wilde famously quipped that sentimentalism is wanting to have an emotion without paying for it, but Little Dog has paid and paid, and the truths arrived at in this book are valuable precisely because they are steeped in feeling.” —Justin Torres, The New York Times Book Review

“Vuong as a writer is daring. He goes where the hurt is, creating a novel saturated with yearning and ache…He transforms the emotional, the visceral, the individual into the political in an unforgettable–indeed, gorgeous–novel, a book that seeks to affect its readers as profoundly as Little Dog is affected, not only by his lover but also by the person who brought him into the world.” —Viet Thanh Nguyen, TIME

“The novel is expansive and introspective, fragmented and dreamlike, a coming of age tale conveyed in images and anecdotes and explorations…Just as he fuels his prose with his poetry, Vuong takes what he needs from lived experience to animate his storytelling with visceral beauty and a strain of what feels like uncut truth…For the duration of this marvelous novel, Vuong holds our gaze and fills it with what he wills — the migration of butterflies, love in a tobacco barn, purple flowers gathered on a highway.” —Steph Cha, Los Angeles Times

“[Vuong is] a remarkable storyteller… Depictions of poverty, queerness, and the immigrant experience are vivid, exacting, and humane… This book is no ordinary novel. This thing feels alive.” —David Canfield, Entertainment Weekly

“The novel’s overarching structure is an ingenious representation of our failure — as members of families and communities, as fellow citizens — to understand one another…[This is] a distinctive, intimate novel that is also a reckoning with the Vietnam War’s long shadow…Vuong is a skillful, daring writer, and his first novel is a powerful one.” —Kevin Canfield, San Francisco Chronicle

“A bildungsroman that vacillates between moments of piercing tenderness and savage brutality, set against quixotic hopes of the American Dream and the devastation of the opioid crisis. Vuong’s deeply felt work might just be the first great fiction of this modern, homegrown travesty, but it’s also a story that is enriched by both the beautiful and the ugly currents of American history.” —Chloe Schama, Vogue

“A diary of life on the margins of American society…For all that Vuong has to say about history, queerness, and American culture, everything about his book feels specific and personal.” —Boris Kachka, Vulture

“Lyrical…With this book, [Vuong] is creating an account of lives that are at once overlooked and thoroughly American. These days, this feels like a political act.”—Wall Street Journal

“Stunningly lyrical…We are witnessing something necessary and powerful with On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, which asks us to search what is human in us and ask what it really means to be alive, to seek truth within the mess that is life.” —Philadelphia Inquirer

“Dazzling…We see the power and purifying rage of Vuong’s prose.” —Julie Wittes Schlack, The ARTery on WBUR.org

“[A] raw, fearless debut…In prose as radiant and assured as his poetry, Vuong explores the ability of stories to heal generational wounds, and asks how we can rescue and transform one another in the wake of unimaginable loss.” —Esquire

“[On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous] captures a peculiar kind of American immigrant experience with all of its cultural ambiguity and heartbreak intact. For all of its pain, it never loses sight of the privilege of being alive.” —Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

“A candid meditation on masculinity, art, and the inescapable pull of opioids…Vuong peels apart phrases and reconfigures them into new, surprising ideas.” —ELLE

“An epistolary masterpiece…Fearless, revelatory, extraordinary.”—Library Journal (starred review)

“Disarmingly frank, raw in subject matter but polished in style and language, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeousreveals the strengths and limitations of human connection and the importance of speaking your truth.” —BookPage

“[Vuong’s] first foray into fiction is poetic in the deepest sense—not merely on the level of language, but in its structure and its intelligence…The result is an uncategorizable hybrid of what reads like memoir, bildungsroman, and book-length poem. More important than labels, though, is the novel's earnest and open-hearted belief in the necessity of stories and language for our survival. A raw and incandescently written foray into fiction by one of our most gifted poets.”—Kirkus (starred review)

“Casting a truly literary spell, Vuong's tale of language and origin, beauty and the power of story, is an enrapturing first novel.”—Booklist (starred review)

“Sometimes a writer comes along and stops your breath. I’m reading On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous and there is so little air moving through my body as I read. When writing is this good, who needs air?” —Jacqueline Woodson, author of Red at the Bone

“A bruised, breathtaking love letter never meant to be sent. A powerful testimony to magic and loss. A marvel.”—Marlon James, author of Black Leopard, Red Wolf

“This is one of the best novels I’ve ever read. I always want my favorite poets to write novels and here it’s happened. Ocean Vuong is a master. This book a masterpiece. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is an ode to loss and struggle, to being a Vietnamese American, to Hartford, Connecticut, and it’s a compassionate epistolary ode to a mother who may or may not know how to read. I dog-eared so many pages the book almost collapsed—I almost did.”—Tommy Orange, author of There There

“On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous will be described — rightly — as luminous, shattering, urgent, necessary. But the word I keep circling back to is raw: that's how powerful the emotions here are, and how you'll feel after reading it — scoured down to bone. With a poet's precision, Ocean Vuong examines whether putting words to one's experience can bridge wounds that span generations, and whether it's ever possible to be truly heard by those we love most.”—Celeste Ng, author of Everything I Never Told You and Little Fires Everywhere

“This book—gorgeous is right there in the title—finds incredible, aching beauty in the deep observation of love in many forms. Ocean Vuong's debut novel contains all the power of his poetry, and I finished the book knowing that we are seeing only the very beginning of his truly magnificent talent.”—Emma Straub, author of Modern Lovers and The Vacationers

“Ocean Vuong runs up against the limits of language—this book is addressed to a mother who cannot read it—and expands our sense of what literature can make visible, thinkable, felt across borders and generations and genres. This is a courageous, embodied inquiry into the tangle of colonial and personal histories. It is also a gorgeous argument for astonishment over irony—for the transformative possibilities of love.”—Ben Lerner, author of Leaving the Atocha Station and 10:04

“One is not often given the chance to apply words like 'brilliant' and 'remarkable' to any novels, certainly not first novels. Thank you, Ocean Vuong, for this brilliant and remarkable first novel."—Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours

“[On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous] is one of the most beautiful novels I have ever read, a literary marvel and a work of extraordinary humanity. It is about who we are, and how we find ourselves in our bodies, in each other, in countries, on this earth: truly a masterpiece.”—Max Porter, Grief is the Thing with Feathers

About the Author

Ocean Vuong is the author of the critically acclaimed poetry collections Night Sky with Exit Wounds and Time is a Mother, as well as the New York Times bestselling novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. A recipient of the 2019 MacArthur "Genius" Grant, he is also the winner of the Whiting Award and the T.S. Eliot Prize. His writings have been featured in The Atlantic, Harper's Magazine, The Nation, The New Republic, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. Born in Saigon, Vietnam, he currently lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

I

Let me begin again.

Dear Ma,

What I am about to tell you you will never know. But so be it. I am writing to reach you-even if each word I put down is one word further from where you are. I am writing to go back to the time, at the rest stop in Virginia, when you stared, horror-struck, at the taxidermy buck hung over the soda machine by the restrooms, its antlers shadowing your face. In the car, you kept shaking your head. "I don't understand why they would do that. Can't they see it's a corpse? A corpse should go away, not get stuck forever like that."

I think now of that buck, how you stared into its black glass eyes and saw your reflection, your whole body, warped in that lifeless mirror. How it was not the grotesque mounting of a decapitated animal that shook you-but that the taxidermy embodied a death that won't finish, a death that keeps dying as we walk past it to relieve ourselves.

I am writing because they told me to never start a sentence with because. But I wasn't trying to make a sentence-I was trying to break free. Because freedom, I am told, is nothing but the distance between the hunter and its prey.

Autumn. Somewhere over Michigan, a colony of monarch butterflies, numbering more than fifteen thousand, are beginning their yearly migration south. In the span of two months, from September to November, they will move, one wing beat at a time, from southern Canada and the United States to portions of central Mexico, where they will spend the winter.

They perch among us, on windowsills and chain-link fences, clotheslines still blurred from the just-hung weight of clothes, windowsills, the hood of a faded-blue Chevy, their wings folding slowly, as if being put away, before snapping once, into flight.

It only takes a single night of frost to kill off a generation. To live, then, is a matter of time, of timing.

That time when I was five or six and, playing a prank, leapt out at you from behind the hallway door, shouting, "Boom!" You screamed, face raked and twisted, then burst into sobs, clutched your chest as you leaned against the door, gasping. I stood bewildered, my toy army helmet tilted on my head. I was an American boy parroting what I saw on TV. I didn't know that the war was still inside you, that there was a war to begin with, that once it enters you it never leaves-but merely echoes, a sound forming the face of your own son. Boom.

That time, in third grade, with the help of Mrs. Callahan, my ESL teacher, I read the first book that I loved, a children's book called Thunder Cake, by Patricia Polacco. In the story, when a girl and her grandmother spot a storm brewing on the green horizon, instead of shuttering the windows or nailing boards on the doors, they set out to bake a cake. I was unmoored by this act, its precarious yet bold refusal of common sense. As Mrs. Callahan stood behind me, her mouth at my ear, I was pulled deeper into the current of language. The story unfurled, its storm rolled in as she spoke, then rolled in once more as I repeated the words.

To bake a cake in the eye of a storm; to feed yourself sugar on the cusp of danger. Because I am your son, this made perfect sense. The first time you hit me, I must have been four. A hand, a flash, a reckoning. My mouth a blaze of touch.

The time I tried to teach you to read the way Mrs. Callahan taught me, my lips to your ear, my hand on yours, the words moving underneath the shadows we made. But that act (a son teaching his mother) reversed our hierarchies, and with it our identities, which, in this country, were already tenuous and tethered. After the stutters and false starts, the sentences warped or locked in your throat, after the embarrassment of failure, you slammed the book shut. "I don't need to read," you said, your expression crunched, and pushed away from the table. "I can see-it's gotten me this far, hasn't it?"

Then the time with the remote control. A bruised welt on my forearm I would lie about to my teachers. "I fell playing tag."

The time, at forty-six, when you had a sudden desire to color. "Let's go to Walmart," you said one morning. "I need coloring books." For months, you filled the space between your arms with all the shades you couldn't pronounce. Magenta, vermilion, marigold, pewter, juniper, cinnamon. Each day, for hours, you slumped over landscapes of farms, pastures, Paris, two horses on a windswept plain, the face of a girl with black hair and skin you left blank, left white. You hung them all over the house, which started to resemble an elementary school classroom. When I asked you, "Why coloring, why now?" you put down the sapphire pencil and stared, dreamlike, at a half-finished garden. "I just go away in it for a while," you said, "but I feel everything. Like I'm still here, in this room."

The time you threw the box of Legos at my head. The hardwood dotted with blood.

"Have you ever made a scene," you said, filling in a Thomas Kinkade house, "and then put yourself inside it? Have you ever watched yourself from behind, going further and deeper into that landscape, away from you?"

How could I tell you that what you were describing was writing? How could I say that we, after all, are so close, the shadows of our hands, on two different pages, merging?

"I'm sorry," you said, bandaging the cut on my forehead. "Grab your coat. I'll get you McDonald's." Head throbbing, I dipped chicken nuggets in ketchup as you watched. "You have to get bigger and stronger, okay?"

I reread Roland Barthes's Mourning Diary yesterday, the book he wrote each day for a year after his mother's death. I have known the body of my mother, he writes, sick and then dying. And that's where I stopped. Where I decided to write to you. You who are still alive.

Those Saturdays at the end of the month when, if you had money left over after the bills, we'd go to the mall. Some people dressed up to go to church or dinner parties; we dressed to the nines to go to a commercial center off I 91. You would wake up early, spend an hour doing your makeup, put on your best sequined black dress, your one pair of gold hoop earrings, black lam shoes. Then you would kneel and smear a handful of pomade through my hair, comb it over.

Seeing us there, a stranger couldn't tell that we bought our groceries at the local corner store on Franklin Avenue, where the doorway was littered with used food stamp receipts, where staples like milk and eggs cost three times more than they did in the suburbs, where the apples, wrinkled and bruised, lay in a cardboard box soaked on the bottom with pig's blood that had leaked from the crate of loose pork chops, the ice long melted.

"Let's get the fancy chocolates," you'd say, pointing to the Godiva chocolatier. We would get a small paper bag containing maybe five or six squares of chocolate we had picked at random. This was often all we bought at the mall. Then we'd walk, passing one back and forth until our fingers shone inky and sweet. "This is how you enjoy your life," you'd say, sucking your fingers, their pink nail polish chipped from a week of giving pedicures.

The time with your fists, shouting in the parking lot, the late sun etching your hair red. My arms shielding my head as your knuckles thudded around me.

Those Saturdays, we'd stroll the corridors until, one by one, the shops pulled shut their steel gates. Then we'd make our way to the bus stop down the street, our breaths floating above us, the makeup drying on your face. Our hands empty except for our hands.

Out my window this morning, just before sunrise, a deer stood in a fog so dense and bright that the second one, not too far away, looked like the unfinished shadow of the first.

You can color that in. You can call it "The History of Memory."

Migration can be triggered by the angle of sunlight, indicating a change in season, temperature, plant life, and food supply. Female monarchs lay eggs along the route. Every history has more than one thread, each thread a story of division. The journey takes four thousand eight hundred and thirty miles, more than the length of this country. The monarchs that fly south will not make it back north. Each departure, then, is final. Only their children return; only the future revisits the past.

What is a country but a borderless sentence, a life?

That time at the Chinese butcher, you pointed to the roasted pig hanging from its hook. "The ribs are just like a person's after they're burned." You let out a clipped chuckle, then paused, took out your pocketbook, your face pinched, and recounted our money.

What is a country but a life sentence?

The time with a gallon of milk. The jug bursting on my shoulder bone, then a steady white rain on the kitchen tiles.

The time at Six Flags, when you rode the Superman roller coaster with me because I was too scared to do it alone. How you threw up afterward, your whole head in the garbage can. How, in my screeching delight, I forgot to say Thank you.

The time we went to Goodwill and piled the cart with items that had a yellow tag, because on that day a yellow tag meant an additional fifty percent off. I pushed the cart and leaped on the back bar, gliding, feeling rich with our bounty of discarded treasures. It was your birthday. We were splurging. "Do I look like a real American?" you said, pressing a white dress to your length. It was slightly too formal for you to have any occasion to wear, yet casual enough to hold a possibility of use. A chance. I nodded, grinning. The cart was so full by then I no longer saw what was ahead of me.

The time with the kitchen knife-the one you picked up, then put down, shaking, saying quietly, "Get out. Get out." And I ran out the door, down the black summer streets. I ran until I forgot I was ten, until my heartbeat was all I could hear of my name.

The time, in New York City, a week after cousin Phuong died in the car wreck, I stepped onto the uptown 2 train and saw his face, clear and round as the doors opened, looking right at me, alive. I gasped-but knew better, that it was only a man who resembled him. Still, it upended me to see what I thought I'd never see again-the features so exact, heavy jaw, open brow. His name lunged to the fore of my mouth before I caught it. Aboveground, I sat on a hydrant and called you. Ma, I saw him, I breathed. Ma, I swear I saw him. I know it's stupid but I saw Phuong on the train. I was having a panic attack. And you knew it. For a while you said nothing, then started to hum the melody to Happy Birthday. It was not my birthday but it was the only song you knew in English, and you kept going. And I listened, the phone pressed so close to my ear that, for the rest of the night, a pink rectangle was imprinted on my cheek.

I am twenty-eight years old, 5ft 4in tall, 112lbs. I am handsome at exactly three angles and deadly from everywhere else. I am writing you from inside a body that used to be yours. Which is to say, I am writing as a son.

If we are lucky, the end of the sentence is where we might begin. If we are lucky, something is passed on, another alphabet written in the blood, sinew, and neuron; ancestors charging their kin with the silent propulsion to fly south, to turn toward the place in the narrative no one was meant to outlast.

The time, at the nail salon, I overheard you consoling a customer over her recent loss. While you painted her nails, she spoke, between tears. "I lost my baby, my little girl, Julie. I can't believe it, she was my strongest, my oldest."

You nodded, eyes sober behind your mask. "It's okay, it's okay," you said in English, "don't cry. Your Julie," you went on, "how she die?"

"Cancer," the lady said. "And in the backyard, too! She died right there in the backyard, dammit."

You put down her hand, took off your mask. Cancer. You leaned forward. "My mom, too, she die from the cancer." The room went quiet. Your co-workers shifted in their seats. "But what happen in backyard, why she die there?"

The woman wiped her eyes. "That's where she lives. Julie's my horse."

You nodded, put on your mask, and got back to painting her nails. After the woman left, you flung the mask across the room. "A fucking horse?" you said in Vietnamese. "Holy shit, I was ready to go to her daughter's grave with flowers!" For the rest of the day, while you worked on one hand or another, you would look up and shout, "It was a fucking horse!" and we'd all laugh.

The time, at thirteen, when I finally said stop. Your hand in the air, my cheek bone stinging from the first blow. Stop, Ma. Quit it. Please. I looked at you hard, the way I had learned, by then, to look into the eyes of my bullies. You turned away and, saying nothing, put on your brown wool coat and walked to the store. I'm getting eggs, you said over your shoulder, as if nothing had happened. But we both knew you'd never hit me again.

Monarchs that survived the migration passed this message down to their children. The memory of family members lost from the initial winter was woven into their genes.

When does a war end? When can I say your name and have it mean only your name and not what you left behind?

The time I woke into an ink-blue hour, my head-no, the house-filled with soft music. My feet on cool hardwood, I walked to your room. Your bed was empty. "Ma," I said, still as a cut flower over the music. It was Chopin, and it was coming from the closet. The door etched in reddish light, like the entrance to a place on fire. I sat outside it, listening to the overture and, underneath that, your steady breathing. I don't know how long I was there. But at one point I went back to bed, pulled the covers to my chin until it stopped, not the song but my shaking. "Ma," I said again, to no one, "come back. Come back out."

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin Press; First Edition (June 4, 2019)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 256 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0525562028
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0525562023
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.31 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.68 x 0.88 x 8.53 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #10,676 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #22 in LGBTQ+ Literary Fiction (Books)
- #377 in Coming of Age Fiction (Books)
- #1,190 in Literary Fiction (Books)

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4.3 19,118 ratings

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Ocean Vuong

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Ocean Vuong is the author of the debut novel, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, out from Penguin Press (2019) and forthcoming in 12 other languages worldwide. He is also the author of the critically acclaimed poetry collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, a New York Times Top 10 Book of 2016, winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Whiting Award, the Thom Gunn Award, and the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. A Ruth Lilly fellow from the Poetry Foundation, his honors include fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, The Elizabeth George Foundation, The Academy of American Poets, and the Pushcart Prize.

Vuong's writings have been featured in The Atlantic, Harpers, The Nation, New Republic, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Village Voice, and American Poetry Review, which awarded him the Stanley Kunitz Prize for Younger Poets. Selected by Foreign Policy magazine as a 2016 100 Leading Global Thinker, alongside Hillary Clinton, Ban Ki-Moon and Justin Trudeau, Ocean was also named by BuzzFeed Books as one of “32 Essential Asian American Writers” and has been profiled on NPR’s “All Things Considered,” PBS NewsHour, Teen Vogue, VICE, The Fantastic Man, and The New Yorker.

Born in Saigon, Vietnam, he lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, where he serves as an Assistant Professor in the MFA Program for Poets and Writers at Umass-Amherst.

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Ty Miller

Stunning book - absolutely heartbreaking and beautiful

Reviewed in the United States on March 19, 2024

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This book SHOULD be confusing to read as the author jumps timelines, locations, perspectives etc... throughout the story, but it somehow reads very fluidly. The prose is absolutely real, raw and beautiful. Each page offers multiple passages that I wanted to underline, highlight and remember.

Stunning book.

3 people found this helpful

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Ridaab

A beautifully raw story about a person’s life,& the people before them

Reviewed in the United States on August 27, 2023

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This was a great and quick read. In total it took me 5 hours to complete this book.

This story is a story of an immigrant living and retelling the stories of the immigrants before him such as his mom and grandma.

Beautifully written. Loved the portrayal of color. In the beginning of the book, the narrator describes colors to inanimate objects/feelings. As he grows older, other people begin to see him as his own skin color, hence they began to project their understanding of color on to him. Suddenly, color no longer describes an object/feeling but it becomes a weapon that divides people. Color becomes a tool that allows him to be put into a box before ever having the opportunity to give others a chance to know him. Color becomes his identity, as well as the identity of everyone around him. It’s also interesting how trauma affects not only those who lived through traumatic experiences, but also their children who will end up growing up with that trauma.

The book has many themes including:
• Race
• Growing up as an American
• Growing up with different cultural identities
• Self Identity/Self Discovery
• Generational Trauma
• Inherited Trauma
•Post war affects
• Growing up bi racial
• Complex parental relationships
• Immigrants
•Immigrants (due to war)
•LGBT

Things I disliked:
Children having sex:
Although the narrator is telling his story, and he is going back in time. I felt highly uncomfortable with the explicit scenes of minors having sex. There was no need to describe certain parts of the body as he did. Simply because of the fact that they were minors when this physical relationship happened. He could have easily mentioned how he felt instead of drawing explicit pictures for his audience.

Neutral comment:
Parts the story seemed messy, however I personally liked it and I understood it because that’s how my brain works. Making footnotes of footnotes. At the same time, it made sense for the story to be “messy” as he’s writing a letter to his mother. It’s not going to be neat. When you write a letter to your loved ones, many times you’re reminiscing about the old times, and so one memory will turn into another into another into another, and so it gives off the authentic vibes of a letter to someone close to you. You want them to remember the scene that you were at.

As many have mentioned, this book isn’t for everyone.
Overall, I rate this book 8.0279/10

It’s a great book, easy to read, and it brought me out of my reading hiatus!

11 people found this helpful

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Sandra Conant

Not for the faint of heart…

Reviewed in the United States on April 21, 2024

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This is a very challenging read. It’s a true poet’s rendering of a life fraught with displacement, a sense of invisibility, a desperate search for “home”, for identity and belonging. There are parts so beautifully written that you want to cry, and parts so cruel and tragic that you want to cry. It is so NOT my experience of life, yet is strangely universal. A privilege to be allowed into the experience.

One person found this helpful

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Douglas C. Cushing

De gustibus non est disputandum

Reviewed in the United States on January 6, 2020

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Reading the reviews of this book here, I found a fascinating snapshot of who we are: richly feeling and yet constrained, open and still closed in mind and heart, welcoming and resolutely petty, loving but spiteful. The book itself was, for me, incandescent, soaring to great heights, and crushing, dragging me as reader to terrible depths. In the balance, the book is a paean to beauty in all its forms--and beauty takes shapes that pierce the spirit with both pain and joy. Regarding literary sensibility, for me there are strains of Proust in the seemingly involuntary function of memory. Another reviewer related this to Whitman and I can absolutely understand why. The references to Barthes, Duchamp, etcetera are part of my regular lexicon of references (given my own work) so Vuong's literary allusions felt natural to me, though I could imagine others growing discontent with the exposure to the unfamiliar--when they don't wish to be sidetracked by new ideas. For me that was always a joy in reading a well-read writer (e.g., Eco or Borges). Vuong loves language with a passion; that is obvious. His ardor sings. The tune is a sometimes a dithyramb, often an elegy, occasionally a hymn, and at times a heartbreaking lament. If I were to offer a criticism of faults, there were a few moments of uneveness of quality in parts II and III. But these seemed exceedingly minor to me in the context of the total work.

The book is not for everyone. I write that in manner similar to saying that Joyce isn't for everyone. Readers who claim the book is bad because they couldn't understand it, because Vuong doesn't follow a straight line or leave a clear thread in the labyrinth for them to follow are claiming a rather pedestrian criterion for a universal judgment. By that measure, "Finnegans Wake" is a crime against humanity! Here's a thought: "I don't like this sort of writing" is a very different statement from "this is bad writing." The former is wholly understandable and might just be a matter of individual taste. The latter is a declaration of critical finality, the rightful domain of consensus and posterity. And to those who recoiled in homophobic disgust, I beg you to try opening yourself up to the world as others live it. I'm a straight white male, so I share neither the same sexual desires nor experiences of America (or world) as the author, but allowing myself to empathize with the characters Vuong writes only makes the scope of human understanding that much broader for me. To feel like some agenda is being pushed upon one here is less a reflection on author, publisher, or reviewers than upon one's own defense mechanisms and inability to momentarily leave a world that only affirms only a dominant narrative that reflects one's own experiences. The abuse of the narrator and other figures, the violence against animals: these things are horrific and abject, yes. But they are also a part of life. As part of life they are subjects of poetic reflection; life is not all happy songs and roses, why should art be? I remember someone complaining that Goya's "Disasters" were so horrific as to render his art bad, or not art at all. Most of us would find that idea risible, but I see the sentiment repeated here. Turning our backs on brutality is to give it access to us unchecked and unexamined. The violence in "On Earth," never felt gratuitous to me nor aestheticized for the sake of glorifying violence or excusing it. Rather, it seemed to me that Vuong explored the ambivalences of our brutality, our ability to be loving, caring monsters, beautiful and horribly flawed. Anyhow, I loved the book and recommend it if you are looking for a read that with at once enthrall and challenge you. I read it in one sitting, so I can say that Vuong captured something profound and compelling for me, personally. I honestly find it hard to believe how young he is; there is a wealth of experience and reflection here that is seemingly beyond his years. I look forward to his future endeavors.

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Top reviews from other countries

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México

Poderosa narrativa critica sobre un pais que hace de la guerra un modo de vida

Reviewed in Mexico on January 28, 2024

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Relato contado por la piel sensible de quien es golpeado, invisibilizado, humillado y demuestra su enorme fortaleza y resistencia a ser destruido mediante la reflexión critica desde los margenes, los afectos y su contacto con la naturaleza, que resulta en una creación poética parida desde el mas profundo dolor compartido con sus ancestros (como el dolor y la muerte te puede partir en dos y multiplicar tu identidad). Las imagenes poéticas forman los ejes filosóficos que atraviesan la obra profundamente politica y pedagógica sobre los costos de economías basadas en la guerra, extractivismo, explotación y destrucción.

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Avid Reader

Bon Apetit!

Reviewed in Canada on May 27, 2023

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From the very first page & throughout the language and imagery are delectable! If superb writing is your thing, this book is for you. I am an underliner & have reread the countless precious morsels again & again, never to tire of them.

3 people found this helpful

Valmir Almagro

On seeing unimaginable lives

Reviewed in Brazil on July 10, 2021

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An extremely powerful narrative of a Vietnamese boy and his relationship with his mother and grandmother living as expatriates in the USA. Also it portrays a coming of age story set in a rural part of America seen with different lenses and the discovery for his first love for a bitterly sad teenage boy.
Writing a letter to his illiterate mother, the narrator reveals all the suffering and complexities that their lives carried away and their struggle for mutual understanding living in a new country.
This a debut autobiographical novel by the highly-awarded poet Ocean Vuong who gives us a heartbreaking punch of his experience for being a foreigner in America. The narrative is full of poetry in its poignant fabric of his personal life and reminded me of a great Portuguese writer as well: Valter Hugo Mãe.
It was a great pleasure to read such a captivating and intense novel.

3 people found this helpful

EGG

un buen regalo

Reviewed in Spain on February 1, 2024

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reyes de mi hija

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Nivedita Dhankhar

Beautiful, Beautiful, Simply Beautiful!

Reviewed in India on August 14, 2023

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Dude, "On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous" blew my mind. Ocean Vuong's writing is like pure art – it's like he's painting feelings with words. The whole book reads like a letter to his mom, diving deep into family, identity, and love. You'll feel every emotion like it's your own. It's like a heart-to-heart with your soul. Vuong's honesty is crazy refreshing, like he's letting you into his world. If you're cool with getting hit right in the feels and being mesmerized by beautiful prose, this book's a no-brainer. Get ready for a ride through the messy, breathtaking parts of life. 📖❤️

2 people found this helpful

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