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!
