On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous: A Novel by Ocean Vuong (English) Hardcover Book

Description: On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong A New York Times bestseller • Nominated for the National Book Award for Fiction • Ocean Vuongs debut novel is a shattering portrait of a family, a first love, and the redemptive power of storytellingNew York Times Readers Pick: 100 Best Books of the 21st Century "A lyrical work of self-discovery thats 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 Ive ever read...Ocean Vuong is a master. This book a masterpiece."—Tommy Orange, author of There There and Wandering StarsOn Earth Were 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 familys 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 Were Briefly Gorgeous is as much about the power of telling ones 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! FORMAT Hardcover LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New Author Biography Ocean Vuong is the author of the critically acclaimed poetry collections Night Sky with Exit Wounds, winner of the Whiting Award and the T. S. Eliot Prize, and Time Is a Mother, a New York Times bestseller. His writings have also been featured in The Atlantic, Harpers, The Nation, The New Republic, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. Born in Saigon, Vietnam, he currently splits his time between Northampton, Massachusetts, and New York City. On Earth Were Briefly Gorgeous is his first novel. 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 Vuongs 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 — hes 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 thats 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 Dogs 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 Were 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 Vuongs metaphors." —Jia Tolentino, The New Yorker "Ocean Vuongs devastatingly beautiful first novel, as evocative as its title, is a painful but extraordinary coming-of-age story about surviving the aftermath of trauma…Vuongs language soars as he writes of beauty, survival, and freedom, which sometimes isnt 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 Vuongs On Earth Were Briefly Gorgeous. Im 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 sons 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 Were 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. Vuongs 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 [Trevors] seductive power over Little Dog: This is some of the most moving writing Ive 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 novels 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 Wars 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. Vuongs deeply felt work might just be the first great fiction of this modern, homegrown travesty, but its 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 Were 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 Vuongs 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 Were 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 Were Briefly Gorgeous reveals the strengths and limitations of human connection and the importance of speaking your truth." —BookPage "[Vuongs] 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 novels 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, Vuongs 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. Im reading On Earth Were 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 Ive ever read. I always want my favorite poets to write novels and here its happened. Ocean Vuong is a master. This book a masterpiece. On Earth Were Briefly Gorgeous is an ode to loss and struggle, to being a Vietnamese American, to Hartford, Connecticut, and its 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 Were Briefly Gorgeous will be described — rightly — as luminous, shattering, urgent, necessary. But the word I keep circling back to is raw: thats how powerful the emotions here are, and how youll feel after reading it — scoured down to bone. With a poets precision, Ocean Vuong examines whether putting words to ones experience can bridge wounds that span generations, and whether its 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 Vuongs 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 Were 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 Review Quote "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 Vuongs 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 -- hes 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 thats 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 Dogs 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 Were 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 Vuongs metaphors." --Jia Tolentino, The New Yorker "Ocean Vuongs devastatingly beautiful first novel, as evocative as its title, is a painful but extraordinary coming-of-age story about surviving the aftermath of trauma...Vuongs language soars as he writes of beauty, survival, and freedom, which sometimes isnt 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 Vuongs On Earth Were Briefly Gorgeous . Im 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 sons 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 Were 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. Vuongs 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 [Trevors] seductive power over Little Dog: This is some of the most moving writing Ive 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 novels 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 Wars 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. Vuongs deeply felt work might just be the first great fiction of this modern, homegrown travesty, but its 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 Were 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 Vuongs 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 Were 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 Description for Reading Group Guide Questions and Topics for Discussion 1. When we meet the narrator of this novel, we dont know his name, only that he is writing to his mother in a language she cannot read. He says, "I am writing from inside a body that used to be yours. Which is to say, I am writing as a son" (10). How does the book explore the interplay of language--how he identifies himself and communicates the world--and lived, corporeal experience? 2. What do the animals in the book--the monarch butterflies, the buffaloes, even the "little dog" after which the narrator is named--represent for the narrator? How does he try to understand their instinctual movements and behaviors? 3. Names are precarious and shifting throughout the novel, for both the narrator and his mother. How does he feel about the name his grandmother gives him, Little Dog? Does his reflection that "to love something, then, is to name it after something so worthless it might be left untouched--and alive. A name, thin as air, can also be a shield" suggest acceptance or dismissal of his given name (18)? 4. Without having language to connect them, how do the narrator and his mother communicate their love for one another? How would you describe their signs of affection, such as his kneading out her back and fetching her cigarettes? What is conventional and what is unconventional about their relationship? 5. How does Lan act as a buffer between Little Dog and his mother? What holes does she help fill in in how he is raised, and what he understands about his past? 6. Do the narrator and his mother have the same idea of what is required, or what it means, to be an American? How do their expectations compare with their experiences--his as a student and hers in the nail salon? 7. How does being raised by two women, whose own relationship is complicated and fraught, impact the narrator? What does he come to understand about violence, sexuality, and loyalty from them? How does their triad blur the lines between generations, and within typical mother-daughter/mother-son relationships? 8. Whom does the narrator have as a father-figure, if anyone? What does his relationship with Paul offer, and how is it limited? 9. What does the narrator take away from the story of Tiger Woods? How is his example both inspiring and unattainable? 10. What are the terms of the narrator and Trevors love, if any? What does their refusal to name or speak about their relationship do to free, or limit, it? 11. Part II ends with a poetic ode to Trevor, in which the narrator switches his point of view. How is he able to write about Trevor in the context of the letter? What would happen if his mother read it? 12. What is the authors relationship with pain and violence, inherited and lived first-hand? How does he represent pain he suffers (from his mother and Trevor) in his writing? Compare how he relates painful versus pleasure: "Sometimes being offered tenderness feels like the very proof that youve been ruined" (119). 13. How are both Trevors family and the narrators marginalized by society? Discuss the role of drugs for the young men and their friends in how they exercise agency and respond to the uncertainty of their lives. 14. How does he respond to Lans PTSD from the war in Vietnam? What about his life is like a war? 15. What sacrifices do all the characters make in the novel? Consider which ones are voluntary and which are involuntary with regards to this reflection by the narrator: "What do you call the animal that, finding the hunter, offers itself to be eaten? A martyr? A weakling? No, a beast gaining the rare agency to stop. Yes, the period in the sentence--its what makes us human, Ma, I swear. It lets us stop in order to keep going" (118). 16. In addition to being a letter, the words of the book are an oblique ode to Trevor. How does the narrator use language to honor his memory, literally and metaphorically? Consider the description of his scar like a comma, and a mouth like a period. 17. Discuss the setting of the novel and its various enclaves--the city versus the tobacco farm, etc. Does the narrator seem to be shaped by his environment, or vice versa? 18. Does the familys story evoke pity or sympathy from you as a reader, and why if so? Consider how they use mood rings to evaluate if theyre happy, and the idea that "Good was more often enough, was a precious spark we sought and harvested of and for one another" (214). 19. While reading, did you know that the novel was autobiographical? How did that affect your understanding of the story if so, and if not does that change your interpretation of it now? Excerpt from Book 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 dont understand why they would do that. Cant they see its 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 wont 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 wasnt 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 didnt 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 childrens 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 dont need to read," you said, your expression crunched, and pushed away from the table. "I can see-its gotten me this far, hasnt 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. "Lets 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 couldnt 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 Im 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? "Im sorry," you said, bandaging the cut on my forehead. "Grab your coat. Ill get you McDonalds." Head throbbing, I dipped chicken nuggets in ketchup as you watched. "You have to get bigger and stronger, okay?" I reread Roland Barthess Mourning Diary yesterday, the book he wrote each day for a year after his mothers death. I have known the body of my mother, he writes, sick and then dying. And thats 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, wed 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 lamZ shoes. Then you would kneel and smear a handful of pomade through my hair, comb it over. Seeing us there, a stranger couldnt 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 pigs blood that had leaked from the crate of loose pork chops, the ice long melted. "Lets get the fancy chocolates," youd 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 wed walk, passing one back and forth until our fingers shone inky and sweet. "This is how you enjoy your life," youd 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, wed stroll the corridors until, one by one, the shops pulled shut their steel gates. Then wed 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 persons after theyre 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 m Description for Library 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 Details ISBN0525562028 Author Ocean Vuong Short Title ON EARTH WERE BRIEFLY GORGEOUS Pages 256 Language English ISBN-10 0525562028 ISBN-13 9780525562023 Format Hardcover DEWEY 813.6 Year 2019 Subtitle A Novel Country of Publication United States AU Release Date 2019-06-04 NZ Release Date 2019-06-04 US Release Date 2019-06-04 UK Release Date 1900-01-01 Publisher Penguin Putnam Inc Publication Date 2019-06-04 Imprint The Penguin Press Audience General We've got this At The Nile, if you're looking for it, we've got it. With fast shipping, low prices, friendly service and well over a million items - you're bound to find what you want, at a price you'll love! TheNile_Item_ID:124460803;

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