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A Novel
by Ocean Vuong
Book Reviewed by:Ocean Vuong returns with a bighearted novel about chosen family, unexpected friendship, and the stories we tell ourselves in order to survive.
One late summer evening in the post-industrial town of East Gladness, Connecticut, nineteen-year-old Hai stands on the edge of a bridge in pelting rain, ready to jump, when he hears someone shout across the river. The voice belongs to Grazina, an elderly widow succumbing to dementia, who convinces him to take another path. Bereft and out of options, he quickly becomes her caretaker. Over the course of the year, the unlikely pair develops a life-altering bond, one built on empathy, spiritual reckoning, and heartbreak, with the power to transform Hai's relationship to himself, his family, and a community on the brink.
Following the cycles of history, memory, and time, The Emperor of Gladness shows the profound ways in which love, labor, and loneliness form the bedrock of American life. At its heart is a brave epic about what it means to exist on the fringes of society and to reckon with the wounds that haunt our collective soul. Hallmarks of Ocean Vuong's writing—formal innovation, syntactic dexterity, and the ability to twin grit with grace through tenderness—are on full display in this story of loss, hope, and how far we would go to possess one of life's most fleeting mercies: a second chance.
Excerpt
The Emperor of Gladness
by Ocean Vuong
"Come in. But take off your shoes. My husband put down these floors." The woman disappeared into the house. The boy hesitated, looking down the empty street. The rain was picking up again. He stepped onto the porch, water running off him in rivulets, took off his boots, and followed her inside.
A creaky rail house built by freight workers over a century ago, the home was one large hallway divided into three rooms: a parlor, a dining room, and a kitchen, whose dim light now glowed at the far end like the hearth of an ancient cave. Furnished in a style the boy had seen only in the black-and-white TV series Lassie, whose reruns he watched on a three-channel Panasonic as a kid, the house had the stuffy odor of rooms whose windows rarely opened undercut with the mildewy rank of crawl spaces. As his eyes adjusted, amorphous furniture upholstered in sprawling pale florals came to view. The walls were wood-paneled and adorned with cheap landscape ...
What are you reading this week? (7/2/2025)
...ntist trying to save mushroom species from extinction and two other women involved in the "romance tour" industry. I loved it. I'm just digging in to The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong – the writing does not feel quite as intensely stunning as On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous , but I am still enjoying it. I also just read the deeply...
-Michelle_H
What are you reading this week? (5/22/2025)
Almost to the end of Ocean Vuong's Emperor of Gladness - truly beautiful writing and close to the end of Marble Hall Murders by Anthony Horowitz. I am listening to Emperor and reading the hard copy of Marble Hall.
-Susan_C
What are you reading this week? (4/17/2025)
I'm finishing a new release - The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong - and I'm enjoying it immensely. Not really sure what it's about yet, but the characters are amazing. Then it's on to Daughters of Shandong for the b...
-kim.kovacs
The novel follows Hai's life over the next several months, narrating Grazina's worsening condition and the bonds he forms with the eccentric crew at the eatery, HomeMarket. Vuong covers a lot of ground. Hai and Sony, for example, are children of Vietnamese immigrants who came to the US after the Vietnam War, while Grazina is a Lithuanian refugee from WWII; the author uses their experiences to illustrate the long-term impacts of such conflicts. The novel is strongly character-driven, and Vuong's ability to fashion such a remarkable cast is astounding. In the hands of a lesser writer some of the personalities could easily have become caricatures. The characters' stories are often heartbreaking; all of the cast, without exception, have experienced profound loss. But it contains quite a lot of much-needed levity, too, and at times it's laugh-out-loud funny...continued
Full Review
(853 words)
(Reviewed by Kim Kovacs).
Colm Tóibín, author of Long Island and Brooklyn
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. Rebecca Solnit, author of A Field Guide to Getting Lost and Recollections of My Nonexistence
Tender and moving, The Emperor of Gladness is about people on the margins of society and sanity. To my surprise and delight, Vuong's novel is also wryly, subtly, wittily—and sometimes outrageously—a comedy as well as a tragedy.
BJ, one of the characters in Ocean Vuong's The Emperor of Gladness, aspires to become a professional wrestler for World Wrestling Entertainment — more commonly known as the WWE.
Merriam-Webster defines professional wrestling as "a form of athletic theater where performers engage in staged mock combat, emphasizing entertainment and storytelling over genuine competition." Although the matches are scripted and outcomes predetermined, professional wrestlers commit to maintaining kayfabe — the pretense that the events happening in the ring are real. Pro wrestling has become an immensely popular spectator sport worldwide; in the United States alone, 90 million people claimed to be fans in a poll conducted in 2022. The WWE's ...
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