On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

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

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.com

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.com
 
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.com
 
[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 Gorgeous reveals 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