Latest news with #OceanVuong
Straits Times
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Straits Times
Book review: Ocean Vuong's The Emperor Of Gladness finds beauty in a forgotten American town
The Emperor Of Gladness is poet and writer Ocean Vuong's sophomore novel. PHOTOS: GIONCARLO VALENTINE, PENGUIN PRESS
ABC News
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- ABC News
The best new books released in May, from Hannah Kent, Ocean Vuong and more
The hunt for a good book never ends. Thankfully, our ABC Arts critics have been busy reading through piles of new releases to find their favourites to share with you. In this month's Best Books column, you'll find a poetic critique of inequality and exploitation in America, a revealing memoir from one of Australia's most beloved authors about her formative experience as an exchange student in Iceland, and an exciting and "ridiculously funny" debut about a literary fraudster in the tradition of Helen Demidenko. Jonathan Cape American poet and novelist Ocean Vuong was born in Vietnam and moved to the US as a refugee with his mother. She — or a version of her — is the focus of his acclaimed 2019 novel, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous. There are mothers and mother figures, absent fathers and refugee histories in his new novel, too, but The Emperor of Gladness is no repeat of his earlier work. Instead, we're taken into the heart of Gladness — East Gladness, to be precise — which is a place, in Cincinnati, rather than a state of joy or happiness. There's Vuong's playfulness, right there, because this is a town verging on a hellscape: depressed, post-industrial, poor, almost falling into the river. The novel opens in 2009 as a young man, Hai, is walking in the rain by that river, crossing the bridge, seriously contemplating jumping off and ending it all. Instead, he's stopped by an interaction with an elderly Lithuanian woman, Grazina, who invites him into her house. He ends up acting as her informal carer: an odd-couple device that's charming and complicated. But this is also a story of living on the margins, trying to get by, of underclasses and drugs, Alzheimer's and despair — and of unlikely alliances that extend well beyond Hai and Grazina. Hai works in a fast food franchise, Home Market, that provides an ensemble cast of characters whose backstories and sweaty hard work come more and more to the fore. Dishwashers, managers, cooks and a foray into wrestling — this is a portrait of America's workforce that is truly diverse, vivid, ground down and not at all clichéed. It's a community to root for, with an unexpected road trip thrown into the mix, that remakes a poetic (but unsentimental) version of Gladness. — Kate Evans W&N The Original Daughter is the story of sisterhood and its precarious balance of rivalry and love. Protagonist Genevieve lives as an only child until she is eight when her sister arrives. She recalls, "Arin didn't appear the way regular sisters did. She was dropped into our lives, fully formed, at the age of seven." As an adult, she's estranged from Arin, and we spend the novel trying to determine what it is that broke them apart. As children, Genevieve and Arin fall easily into step as sisters, their relationship filled with joy and mutual admiration. But beneath this is the sting of jealousy. Genevieve is terrified that Arin will either steal her life or, worse, leave. She is torn between the love she feels for her sister and anger she feels when it seems that Arin might usurp her in their family hierarchy. Set against the vivid backdrop of working-class Singapore in the 2000s, Wei writes richly, skilfully and without hyperbole about what it means to be family and particularly what it means to be a 'Jie Jie' or sister. The Original Daughter asks with great care who we are if not amalgamations of the ones we love — mining unconsciously or consciously the mannerisms, behaviours and even lives of those we admire. — Rosie Ofori Ward Simon & Schuster/Summit Books Ern Malley. Helen Demidenko. Norma Khouri. Wanda Koolmatrie. Australia has a rich and storied tradition of fakers, forgers, frauds and fabricators. For his debut, Greece-based Dominic Amerena offers us a character who is a worthy addition to this gallery of fiasco-mongers: an insecure, craven, sickly and mercifully unnamed narrator. Peddling his blood and body as a clinical trial subject at the local hospital while attempting to succeed as a writer, his existence is dreary. He envies his "Melbourne-famous" writer partner, Ruth, who has found acclaim selling a story about her mother. Given the precarity of the artistic landscape, only a fool would refuse an opportunity for advancement, and the narrator is no fool. Swimming at the Victoria University pools, he encounters Brenda Shales. A Whitlam-era luminary — part Thea Astley, part Helen Garner — she wrote two novels, won a cult following and promptly vanished into the only dignified position available to a self-respecting literary author: obscurity. Who better to provide prestige than a recluse with some flesh to offer the biographical mill? It's not quite spotting Christ on the boulevard, but it will do. He sets about writing a tell-all account of what happened to the celebrated author. He will be her witness, her confidante. The Boswell to her Johnson. He will bask in the second-hand shadow of her literary light. He will build his fame upon hers. This is a ridiculously funny meditation on careerism and economic precarity. In I Want Everything, the opportunism of the present eclipses… well, everything. Where authors once sought time and space to write, now they seek time and space to better leverage their brand. You may want it all, Amerena suggests, but first you'll need to sell yourself out — along with your friends, enemies, colleagues, fans, associates, pets, peers and family. — Declan Fry Picador Edith — the central character of British author Sarah Moss's ninth novel, Ripeness — grew up as an outsider, the daughter of a Jewish refugee and a northern English farmer. Now 73, she has separated from her husband of 40 years and found a home in a village in County Clare in Ireland. As her four passports attest, she doesn't belong anywhere but it's here she intends to stay, on "the wet coast of a wet North Atlantic island off a bigger wet North Atlantic island". The narrative shifts in the second chapter. It's the mid-60s and Edith, 17, is about to embark on a gap year in Europe before she commences at Oxford University. At the last minute, however, her mother changes the plan — rather than travel to Florence, Edith is to go to her sister Lydia, eight months pregnant and ensconced in a villa on the shores of Lake Como. Once there, Edith is to care for Lydia, a professional ballerina, and call a number when the baby comes. Told in alternating chapters (shifting between first-person narration in Italy and third-person in Ireland), the story's two strands bookend Edith's adult life. In Italy, she is an innocent whose knowledge of childbirth and motherhood comes from books and tending stock on the family farm. In her 70s, her pared-back life reflects the wisdom she's acquired over the decades; her house is small and neat, and her life is one of simple pleasures: walking outdoors, ocean swims, cups of tea, friendship and, on Thursday nights, sleeping with a companionable German potter who lives in the village. That's not to say Edith doesn't feel regret: for the baby born in Italy, for the years she spent trying to please others, for not being a better mother to her son. In Ripeness, Moss considers what it is to belong, the tension between age-old tradition and new ways of living, and how waves of migration shape communities. Moss also explores the thornier sides of motherhood: the effects of trauma, the historic shame of unwanted pregnancy and the ambivalence some people feel at becoming mothers at all. But Ripeness is also a moving and nuanced celebration of life, however imperfect its beginnings, and the joy of saying yes. — Nicola Heath Picador Hannah Kent wrote her way into the international literary scene in 2013 with a surprise bestseller, Burial Rites. Surprising? Only that she was a debut author, writing historical fiction set in Iceland in 1830, based on the real story of Agnes Magnúsdóttir, the last woman executed in that country. Since then, Kent has continued to write, create and imagine her way into the past — with The Good People (2016) and Devotion (2021) — but something kept pulling her back to Iceland, 16,000 km away from her South Australian home. In her memoir, Kent explains her connection to Iceland and revisits her writing of Burial Rites, lyrically and thoughtfully examining ideas of home and how it is that this 'foreign' country has inhabited her and continues to haunt her dreams and imagination. When she was 17, Kent travelled to Iceland as a Rotary Exchange Student. This experience is told with compelling clarity — the adventure, the bewildering language, not being met at the airport, the both warm and mystifyingly cold hosts, the shift that accompanies making new friendships and the growing appreciation of the wild white landscape. But that's not all — because the place, the stories, the archive, the families all followed her home. Followed her creatively, into the writing of Burial Rites, but kept following her for years after. And as this memoir opens, at home with a new baby, feeling detached from her body and delirious with tiredness, she realises that her sense of home, longing, memory, place and language are intimately tied to this distant land. A long way from Adelaide's heat. And so with a true writer's heart, she takes us back there — revealing silences and white stretches of paper, alongside the hush of snowfall and the white stretches of landscape. What does it mean, to be always home and always homesick? There are answers here. — Kate Evans Black Inc. The body of a girl, said to be a saint, is transported from the Pacific to the Kimberley. We know little about her. Why is she nameless? How did she reach the Pacific? Why is she beatified? One thing we do know: before she was entrusted to the care of a woodworker named Orrin, she was assaulted and died at the age of 14. Desecrations and loss haunt the saint's passage through time and space. The reader is encouraged to play detective, piecing together contextual details of the story's little worlds. Throughout the book, an omniscient narrative voice offers a sly, critical commentary on the saint's treatment and the characters' actions, contradicting the idea that she is either nameless or beatified. Thematic and narrative links between the book's four sections gradually emerge. A running theme throughout is grace, especially as women are afforded or denied it. The saint's existence in the form of a girl whose life was tragic and short suggests an ironic, if not aggrieved, stance toward notions of the sacred. Violence and erasure occur here in both dramatic and quiet ways. If the characters' failings are tempered by a desire for sacredness, it is a sacredness that often masks devastation: the Pacific island that forms the background to the opening vignette, for example, is depicted as a place gouged for phosphate mining and ruled by various colonial administrations; the failure of the girl saint's body to register any trace of the violence done to it is not absolution but a 'betrayal'. Rowe's graceful prose offers a suggestive, elliptical, thoughtful exploration of the lives of women. The result is a book about the hypocrisy and moral duplicity of a world more accustomed to realise its future ideals than its present. — Declan Fry Tune in to ABC Radio National at 10am Mondays for The Book Show and 10am Fridays for The Bookshelf.
Los Angeles Times
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
The week's bestselling books, June 1
1. The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong (Penguin Press: $30) An unlikely pair develops a life-altering bond. 2. Nightshade by Michael Connelly (Little, Brown & Co.: $30) The bestselling crime writer returns with a new cop on a mission, this time on Catalina Island. 3. James by Percival Everett (Doubleday: $28) An action-packed reimagining of 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.' 4. Fever Beach by Carl Hiaasen (Knopf: $30) Two Floridians are plunged into a mystery involving dark money and darker motives. 5. My Name Is Emilia del Valle by Isabel Allende (Ballantine Books: $30) A young writer in the late 1800s travels to South America to uncover the truth about her father. 6. Great Big Beautiful Life by Emily Henry (Berkley: $29) Two writers compete for the chance to tell the larger-than-life story of an heiress. 7. Spent by Alison Bechdel (Mariner Books: $32) The bestselling writer's latest comic novel takes on capitalism and consumption. 8. My Friends by Fredrik Backman (Atria Books: $30) The bond between a group of teens 25 years earlier has a powerful effect on a budding artist. 9. The Knight and the Moth by Rachel Gillig (Orbit: $30) A young prophet takes an impossible quest with the one knight whose future is beyond her sight. 10. Anima Rising by Christopher Moore (William Morrow: $30) The tale of a mad scientist, a famous painter and an undead woman's journey of self-discovery. … 1. Original Sin by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson (Penguin Press: $32) Inside President Biden's doomed decision to run for reelection and the hiding of his serious decline by his inner circle. 2. The Let Them Theory by Mel Robbins (Hay House: $30) How to stop wasting energy on things you can't control. 3. Who Knew by Barry Diller (Simon & Schuster: $30) A frank memoir from one of America's top businessmen. 4. Is a River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane (W. W. Norton & Co.: $32) The naturalist explores rivers as living beings whose fate is tied with our own. 5. The Creative Act by Rick Rubin (Penguin: $32) The music producer on how to be a creative person. 6. Mark Twain by Ron Chernow (Penguin Press: $45) The Pulitzer-winning biographer explores the life of the celebrated American writer. 7. Notes to John by Joan Didion (Knopf: $32) Diary entries from the famed writer's journal. 8. Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson (Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster: $30) A call to renew a politics of plenty and abandon the chosen scarcities that have deformed American life. 9. One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad (Knopf: $28) Reckoning with what it means to live in a West that betrays its fundamental values. 10. Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams (Flatiron Books: $33) An insider's account of working at Facebook. … 1. Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar (Vintage: $18) 2. All Fours by Miranda July (Riverhead Books: $19) 3. Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt (Ecco: $20) 4. The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley (Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster: $19) 5. The Paris Novel by Ruth Reichl (Random House Trade Paperbacks: $19) 6. I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman (Transit Books: $17) 7. Orbital by Samantha Harvey (Grove Press: $17) 8. Tom Lake by Ann Patchett (Harper Perennial: $19) 9. Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver (Harper Perennial: $22) 10. The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese (Grove Press: $22) … 1. On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder (Crown: $12) 2. The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron (TarcherPerigee: $20) 3. The Body Keeps the Score by Dr. Bessel van der Kolk (Penguin: $19) 4. The Wager by David Grann (Vintage: $21) 5. Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: $18) 6. The Art Thief by Michael Finkel (Vintage: $18) 7. Catching the Big Fish by David Lynch (Tarcher: $20) 8. The Backyard Bird Chronicles by Amy Tan (Knopf: $36) 9. The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz (Amber-Allen: $13) 10. All About Love by bell hooks (Morrow: $17)
Irish Independent
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Independent
Ocean Vuong swaps poetry for prose in The Emperor of Gladness, and with mixed results
Ocean Vuong first made his name as a poet. His debut full-length collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds (2016), was widely acclaimed, earning him the TS Eliot Prize, of which he is the youngest ever recipient.
The Spinoff
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Spinoff
The Unity Books bestseller chart for the week ending May 23
The only published and available best-selling indie book chart in New Zealand is the top 10 sales list recorded every week at Unity Books' stores in High St, Auckland, and Willis St, Wellington. This week we are publishing Unity Auckland's bestsellers only, but will resume usual service and include Wellington next week. AUCKLAND 1 The Book of Guilt by Catherine Chidgey (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $38) Thanks to an epic Auckland Writers Festival in which Chidgey appeared, The Book of Guilt is the first Aotearoa book to hit 1,000 book sales this year (according to NielsenIQ Bookdata). The Spinoff's books editor Claire Mabey gave Chidgey's latest novel a rave: read the review here. New Zealander Wynn-Williams on her time working for Meta. 3 Orbital by Samantha Harvey (Jonathan Cape, $26) Last year's Booker Prize winner set in space over one day, and the subject of a headline event at the Auckland Writers Festival last weekend. This year's Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction offered one of the most memorable nights in Ockham New Zealand Book Awards lore: Wilkins arrived only just in time to give his acceptance speech after a day of flight delays and other hi-jinks. Read an interview with Wilkins on The Spinoff, here. 5 You Are Here by David Nicholls (Hachette, $28) Absolutely charming story of walking and thinking and romance. 6 When the Going Was Good by Graydon Carter (Grove Press, $40) The memoir of a magazine editor. 8 The Emperor Of Gladness by Ocean Vuong (Penguin Random House, $38) Poet and memoirist Ocean Vuong's long-awaited novel is finally here and has arrived to rave reviews. 'Ocean Vuong's second novel is a 416‑page tour of the edgeland between aspirational fantasy and self-deception. It opens with a long slow pan over the fictional small town of East Gladness, Connecticut, beginning with ghosts that rise 'as mist over the rye across the tracks' and ending on a bridge where the camera finds a young man called Hai –'19, in the midnight of his childhood and a lifetime from first light' – preparing to drown himself. There's an almost lazy richness to the picture: the late afternoon sun, the 'moss so lush between the wooden rail ties that, at a certain angle of thick, verdant light, it looks like algae', the junkyard 'packed with school buses in various stages of amnesia'.' Read the rest of The Guardian's review, here. 9 38 Londres Street: On Impunity, Pinochet in England and a Nazi in Patagonia by Phillipe Sands (Weidenfeld & Nicholson $40) 'In 38 Londres Street, Philippe Sands blends personal memoir, historical detective work and gripping courtroom drama to probe a secret double story of mass murder, one that reveals a shocking thread that links the horrors of the 1940s with those of our own times.' Sounds like … a lot. 10 Air by John Boyne (Doubleday UK, $35) For those who have been following Boyne's bestselling elements series this is the book that brings them all together.
