THE EMPEROR OF GLADNESS
May 13, 2025 - Available now!
“The Emperor of Gladness is a poetic, dramatic and vivid story. Epic in its sweep, the novel also handles intimacy and love with delicacy and deep originality. Hai and Grazina are taken from the margins of American life by Ocean Vuong and, by dint of great sympathy and imaginative genius, placed at the very center of our world.”
—Colm Tóibín
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“Poet Vuong follows up his acclaimed first novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, with a searching and beautiful story of a troubled young man . . . Vuong’s scenes are vivid, and the pitch-perfect dialogue cuts like a knife . . . This downbeat tale soars to astonishing heights.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“[E]xploring themes of war and labor—their wretchedness, their dignity—Vuong's epic-feeling novel is a determined portrait of community, caretaking, and characters who, if they only have each other, have quite a lot.”
—Booklist (starred review)
“[A]mbitious . . . The references to Slaughterhouse-Five and The Brothers Karamazov underscore Vuong’s interest in exploring war and morality, but this is remarkable as a novel that tries to look at those themes outside of conventional realism or combat porn . . . A sui generis take on the surprising and cruel ways violence is passed on across generations.”
—Kirkus (starred review)
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Praise for The Emperor of Gladness:
“Magnificent . . . In writing this book, Vuong may have joined the ranks of an elite few great novelists.”
—Los Angeles Times​
“It’s one of the best books I’ve ever, ever read.”
—Oprah
"Heartbreaking, heartwarming yet unsentimental, and savagely comic all at the same time.”
—The Guardian
“Ocean Vuong is one of the country’s most esteemed poets and novelists.”
—The New York Tines
[A] miraculous lack of sentimentality .... The Emperor of Gladness is a truly great novel about work—still an under-acknowledged topic in American fiction ... Vuong's achingly austere artistic vision leaves it to his readers to imagine the better world he won't let himself depict on the pages of this wonderful novel."
—Maureen Corrigan, Fresh Air
“[Vuong] defies the sophomore slump.”
—GQ
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“Ocean Vuong sits among an elite sliver of celebrated U.S. writers.”
—NPR
“A masterwork.”
—Bryan Washington
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“Unremittingly gorgeous . . . For Vuong, fiction is a moral instrument, and he plays it with the practiced hand of a virtuoso.”
—Christian Science Monitor
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“Magisterial, precise and mythic in its resonance.”
—BookPage
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“Ocean Vuong is uniquely talented at capturing the tender and wrought feelings of loss. His novels are live wires of emotion, crackling at each page with possibility. The Emperor of Gladness is no different.”
—Chicago Review of Books
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“One of the country’s most admired young writers.”
—The Associated Press
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​"As he has continually done in his work for the last decade, Vuong insists on the radical possibilities of tenderness and communion, and on our ability to remain in awe of this world even as our lives and the structures we rely on may be fracturing. The Emperor of Gladness offers readers a special gift: the practice of looking carefully at the world around us, and at the people who surround us, with more meaning and care.”
—Poets & Writers
ON EARTH WE'RE BRIEFLY GORGEOUS
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"Vuong is a mightily gifted observer...moving and rarely less than excellent."
--The New York Times
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"Emerging from the most marginalized circumstances, [Vuong] has produced a lyrical work of self-discovery that’s shockingly intimate and insistently universal."
--The Washington Post
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On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a book of sustained beauty and lyricism, earnest and relentless, a series of high notes that trembles exquisitely almost without break...[M]arvelous."
--Los Angeles Times
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"Raw...fearless. In prose as radiant and assured as his poetry, Vuong explores the ability of stories to heal generational wounds."
--Esquire
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"[S]et 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."
--Vogue
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“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
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“This is one of the best novels I've ever read...Ocean Vuong is a master. This book a masterpiece."
--Tommy Orange, author of There, There
“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
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“A candid meditation on masculinity, art, and the inescapable pull of opioids…Vuong peels apart phrases and reconfigures them into new, surprising ideas.”
—ELLE
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“[A]n epistolary masterpiece...Fearless, revelatory, extraordinary; an essential acquisition for every library.”
--Library Journal (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)​​​​​
Nominated for the National Book Award
Nominated for PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel
Winner of the American Book Award
Winner of the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature
Winner of the New England Book Award
Winner of the Massachusetts Book Award
Winner of the Connecticut Book Award
Winner of the Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize
Winner of the Publishing Triangle’s Award for Fiction
Winner of the Digital Book World: Best Book
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Praise for On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous:
“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
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"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."
—Jia Tolentino, The New Yorker
"[A]n 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
“One of the most beautiful novels I have ever read, a literary marvel and a work of extraordinary humanity...truly a masterpiece.”
--Max Porter, author of Grief is the Thing with Feathers
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“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
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"Vuong writes with a clear beauty and insistence unlike any other writer working today."
--NYLON
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"Searingly gorgeous."
--Refinery29
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"More than anything I’ve lately encountered, Vuong’s novel is a burning effigy of The Way We Live Now, sending the idea of “American values” up in flames."
--Vulture
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“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
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“Reading Ocean Vuong’s first novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, I feel as if I am watching a small sheet of paper unfold and unfold and unfold… Vuong offers observation and respect for what has been given, and an awe for life and what it takes to survive.”
--Paris Review
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“[A] haunting meditation on loss, love, and the limits of human connection.”
--Publishers Weekly
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“[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)​​​​