On earth we're briefly gorgeous : a novel / Ocean Vuong.
Record details
- ISBN: 9780525562023 (hc)
- Physical Description: 246 pages ; 22 cm
- Publisher: New York : Penguin Press, 2019.
- Copyright: ©2019.
Search for related items by subject
Subject: | Vietnamese Americans > Fiction. Mothers and sons > Fiction. Families. > Fiction. |
Genre: | Bildungsromans. |
Available copies
- 22 of 29 copies available at BC Interlibrary Connect. (Show)
- 1 of 1 copy available at Terrace Public Library.
Holds
- 1 current hold with 29 total copies.
Other Formats and Editions
Location | Call Number / Copy Notes | Barcode | Shelving Location | Holdable? | Status | Due Date |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Terrace Public Library | VUO (Text) | 35151001088517 | Adult Fiction | Volume hold | Available | - |
- Booklist Reviews : Booklist Reviews 2019 April #2
*Starred Review* This first novel by poet Vuong (Night Sky with Exit Wounds, 2016) is narrated by Little Dog, a Vietnamese refugee who grew up in Hartford with his mother and his maternal grandmother, Lan. A writer now, he addresses his story as a letter to his mother, who cannot read, to tell you everything you'll never know. He recalls her painful attempts to toughen him and his simultaneous rage for all that frays herâwork, memories, difficulty communicating. At 14 he gets a job cutting tobacco, and there meets Trevor. Two years older, Trevor works to escape his alcoholic father and makes Little Dog feel seenâI who had seldom been seen by anyone. Their covert love blooms brilliantly as Trevor, battling his own demons, handles Little Dog with bewildering warmth. This plot line is its own speeding train, while Little Dog's letter also reveals the family's inextricable legacy from the Vietnam War. In Vuong's acrobatic storytelling, Lan's traumatic wartime tale unspools in a spiraling dive, and a portrait of Trevor emerges in the snapshots of a 10-page prose poem. Casting a truly literary spell, Vuong's tale of language and origin, beauty and the power of story, is an enrapturing first novel. Copyright 2019 Booklist Reviews. - BookPage Reviews : BookPage Reviews 2019 June
On Earth We're Briefly GorgeousPoet Ocean Vuong's highly anticipated debut novel, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, takes the form of a letter from a young writer to his illiterate mother. The writer, who goes by the nickname Little Dog and whose life bears a strong resemblance to Vuong's own, is the first of his family to go to college. The letter is an attempt to share his fragile sense of self with his mother.
Little Dog's grandmother survived the Vietnam War as a sex worker, and his mother was fathered by an American soldier. After immigrating to the United States and settling in a working-class Connecticut neighborhood, Little Dog became a victim of his mother's abuse and a witness to his grandmother's untreated schizophrenia. Without siblings or a father, Little Dog was isolated and lonely, hyperaware of his small size, his lack of English and his origins.Â
Vuong's poetry collection Night Sky With Exit Wounds was one of the most celebrated books of 2016. In On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, his prose is richly poetic, and his references draw from a wide range of sources, from Roland Barthes to 50 Cent. The novel seems like part memoir, part epic poem, although at times the lyricism feels overly mannered and the associations strained.
The novel finds its heart when Little Dog invites his mother to acknowledge a part of his life he's never fully shared with her. Little Dog and Trevor met as teenagers when they worked on a tobacco farm, and their attraction was immediate. The depiction of the boys' affair is graphic yet tender, and the blunt portrayal of Trevor's opioid addiction alludes to the grim consequences of poverty and violence in their community.
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.
Copyright 2019 BookPage Reviews. - Kirkus Reviews : Kirkus Reviews 2019 April #1
A young man writes a letter to his illiterate mother in an attempt to make sense of his traumatic beginnings. When Little Dog is a child growing up in Hartford, he is asked to make a family tree. Where other children draw full green branches full of relatives, Little Dog's branches are bare, with just five names. Born in Vietnam, Little Dog now lives with his abusiveâand abusedâmother and his schizophrenic grandmother. The Vietnam War casts a long shadow on his life: His mother is the child of an anonymous American soldierâhis grandmother survived as a sex worker during the conflict. Without siblings, without a father, Little Dog's loneliness is exacerbated by his otherness: He is small, poor, Asian, and queer. Much of the novel recounts his first love affair as a teen, with a "redneck" from the white part of town, as he confesses to his mother how this doomed relationship is akin to his violent childhood. In telling the stories of those who exist in the margins, Little Dog says, "I never wanted to build a 'body of work,' but to preserve these, our bodies, breathing and unaccounted for, inside the work." Vuong has written one of the most lauded poetry debuts in recent memory (Night Sky with Exit Wounds, 2016), and his first foray into fiction is poetic in the deepest senseânot merely on the level of language, but in its structure and its intelligence, moving associationally from memory to memory, quoting Barthes, then rapper 50 Cent. 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. Copyright Kirkus 2019 Kirkus/BPI Communications. All rights reserved. - Library Journal Reviews : LJ Reviews 2019 January #1
A young man named Little Dog writes a letter to his mother, who cannot read, investigating a family history begun in Vietnam and addressing stark issues of race, class, and masculinity. If Vuong's debut novel is anything like his exquisite full-length poetry debut,
Copyright 2018 Library Journal.Night Sky with Exit Wounds , a T.S. Eliot Prize winner andLJ Best Poetry Book, it will be sensational. - Library Journal Reviews : LJ Reviews 2019 March #1
DEBUT The cover calls this a novel, but the autobiographical overlaps are many: a gay Vietnamese American poet, an October birth outside Saigon, an other-side-of-the-world escape, a biracial single mother, a Hartford, CT, upbringing, a New York City education. In his prose debut, T.S. Eliot-prized, Whiting-awarded Vuong mines his memories, his traumas, his triumphs to create an epistolary masterpiece addressed to his motherâwho can't read. Whispered a name at birth meaning "Patriotic Leader of the Nation," he's instead called "Little Dog," because "[t]o love somethingâ¦is to name it after something so worthless it might be left untouchedâand alive." Escaping Vietnam, Little Dog grows up with his grandmother's stories of survival, of what she did to feed one daughter, then another. In a house full of damaged women, he replays his mother's monstrous abuses, her unrelenting sacrifices: "parents suffering from PTSD are more likely to hit their children." And yet, "[p]erhaps to lay hands on your child is to prepare him for war." In his precarious journey to manhood, race, poverty, mental illness, isolation, sexuality, first love, and death prove to be perilous challenges. Writing will save his life.
Copyright 2019 Library Journal.VERDICT Fearless, revelatory, extraordinary; an essential acquisition for every library. [See Prepub Alert, 12/3/18.]âTerry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC - Publishers Weekly Reviews : PW Reviews 2019 April #1
Poet Vuong's frank first novel (after
Copyright 2019 Publishers Weekly.Night Sky with Exit Wounds ) takes the form of a letter from a man to his illiterate mother in which 28-year-old Little Dog, a writer who's left the impoverished Hartford, Conn., of his youth for New York City, retraces his coming of age. His childhood is marked by abuse from his overworked mother, as well as the traumas he's inherited from his mother's and grandmother's experiences during the Vietnam War. Having left Vietnam with them as a young boy, and after the incarceration of his father, Little Dog's attempts to assimilate include contending with language barriers and the banal cruelty of the supposedly well-intentioned. He must also adapt to the world as a gay man and as a writerâthe novel's beating heart rests in Little Dog's first, doomed love affair with another teenage boy, and in his attempts to describe what being a writer truly is. Vuong's prose shines in the intimate scenes between the young men, but sometimes the lyricism has a straining, vague quality ("They say nothing lasts forever but they're just scared it will last longer than they will love it"; "But the thing about forever is you can't take it back"). Nevertheless, this is a haunting meditation on loss, love, and the limits of human connection. (June)