Un bref instant de splendeur se présente sous la forme d'une lettre qu'un fils adresse à sa mère qui ne la lira jamais. Fille d'un soldat américain et d'une paysanne vietnamienne, elle est analphabète, parle à peine anglais et travaille dans un salon de manucure aux États-Unis. Elle est le pur produit d'une guerre oubliée. Son fils, dont la peau est trop claire pour un Vietnamien mais pas assez pour un Américain, entreprend de retracer leur histoire familiale : la schizophrénie de sa grand-mère traumatisée par les bombes ennemies au Vietnam, les poings durs de sa mère contre son corps d'enfant, son premier amour marqué d'un sceau funeste, sa découverte du désir, de son homosexualité et du pouvoir rédempteur de l'écriture.Ce premier roman, écrit dans une langue d'une beauté grandiose, explore avec une urgence et une grâce stupéfiantes les questions de race, de classe et de masculinité. Ocean Vuong signe une plongée dans les eaux troubles de la violence, du déracinement et de l'addiction, que la tendresse et la compassion viennent toujours adroitement contrebalancer. Un livre d'une justesse bouleversante sur la capacité des mots à panser les plaies ouvertes depuis des générations.
Un soldat américain a baisé une jeune fermière vietnamienne. D'où le fait que ma mère existe. D'où le fait que j'existe. D'où le fait que : pas de bombes = pas de famille = pas de moi. «J'ai entendu Ocean et l'océan en moi... depuis ce livre, tout bouge non seulement autour de moi, mais surtout au fond de cette âme qui s'est dénudée..» - Kim Thúy. «Extatique, grivois, hanté et génial...» - The Boston Globe. «Un puissant courant traverse ces poèmes...» - Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times. «Une fois entendue, cette voix ne nous quitte plus.» - The Guardian. Traduit par Marc Charron. En plus de figurer aux côtés d'Hillary Clinton, Ban Ki- Moon et Warsan Shire parmi les 100 penseurs les plus influents du monde en 2016 de la revue Foreign Policy, Ocean Vuong a été l'un des « 32 écrivains asio-américains à ne pas manquer » de BuzzFeed Books. Récipiendaire d'un prix Whiting 2016.
**THE SUNDAY TIMES and NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER** Brilliant, heartbreaking, tender, and highly original - poet Ocean Vuong's debut novel is a sweeping and shattering portrait of a family, and a testament to 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 epicentre 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 the American moment, immersed as it is 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.
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 thats shockingly intimate and insistently universa lN ot so much briefly gorgeous as permanently stunning. --Ron Charles, The Washington Post Poet Ocean Vuongs debut novel is a shattering portrait of a family, a first love, and the redemptive power of storytelling On 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!
Ocean Vuong is the author of the critically acclaimed poetry collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds , winner of the Whiting Award and the T.S. Eliot Prize. His writings have also been featured in The Atlantic , Harper''s , The Nation , New Republic , The New Yorker , and The New York Times . In 2019 he was awarded a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. Born in Saigon, Vietnam, he currently lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, where he serves as an Assistant Professor of English at UMass-Amherst. On Earth We''re Briefly Gorgeous is his first novel.>
The debut novel of the acclaimed young poet. Little Dog writes a letter to a mother who cannot read, contending with a family history with Vietnam at its centre but speaking of the concerns of the contemporary American moment.
Winner of the 2017 T. S. Eliot Prize Winner of the 2017 Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection A Guardian / Daily Telegraph Book of the Year PBS Summer Recommendation An extraordinary debut from a young Vietnamese American, Night Sky with Exit Wounds is a book of poetry unlike any other. Steeped in war and cultural upheaval and wielding a fresh new language, Vuong writes about the most profound subjects - love and loss, conflict, grief, memory and desire - and attends to them all with lines that feel newly-minted, graceful in their cadences, passionate and hungry in their tender, close attention: '...the chief of police/facedown in a pool of Coca-Cola./A palm-sized photo of his father soaking/beside his left ear.' This is an unusual, important book: both gentle and visceral, vulnerable and assured, and its blend of humanity and power make it one of the best first collections of poetry to come out of America in years.
'These are poems of exquisite beauty, unashamed of romance, and undaunted by looking directly into the horrors of war, the silences of history. One of the most important debut collections for a generation.' Andrew McMillan
How else do we return to ourselves but to fold The page so it points to the good part In this deeply intimate second poetry collection, Ocean Vuong searches for life among the aftershocks of his mother''s death, embodying the paradox of sitting within grief while being determined to survive beyond it. Shifting through memory, and in concert with the themes of his novel On Earth We''re Briefly Gorgeous , Vuong contends with personal loss, the meaning of family, and the cost of being the product of an American war in America. At once vivid, brave, and propulsive, Vuong''s poems circle fragmented lives to find both restoration as well as the epicentre of the break. The author of the critically acclaimed poetry collection Night Sky With Exit Wounds , winner of the 2016 Whiting Award, the 2017 T.S. Eliot Prize, and a 2019 MacArthur fellow, Vuong writes directly to our humanity without losing sight of the current moment. These poems represent a more innovative and daring experimentation with language and form, illuminating how the themes we perennially live in and question are truly inexhaustible. Bold and prescient, and a testament to tenderness in the face of violence, Time Is a Mother is a return and a forging-forth all at once.
