The Emperor of Gladness: Oprah's Book Club
The Emperor of Gladness: Oprah's Book Club
by Ocean Vuong
Couldn't load pickup availability
Share
About the Book
The instant New York Times bestseller • Oprah’s Book Club Pick • Ocean Vuong returns with a bighearted novel about chosen family, unexpected friendship, and the stories we tell ourselves in order to survive“
Stunning . . . A heartfelt and powerful examination of those living on the fringes of society, and the unique challenges they face to survive and thrive.” —Oprah Winfrey“
Magnificent . . . In writing this book, Vuong may have joined the ranks of an elite few great novelists.” —Leigh Haber, Los Angeles Times
The hardest thing in the world is to live only once…
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.
About the Author
Ocean Vuong is the author of the critically acclaimed poetry collections Night Sky with Exit Wounds and Time Is a Mother, as well as the New York Times bestselling novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. A recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship and the American Book Award, he was born in Saigon, Vietnam, and currently splits his time between western Massachusetts and New York City. The Emperor of Gladness is his latest novel.
Editorial Reviews
“Vuong’s protagonist, Hai, is a drug-addicted college dropout living in the fictional town of East Gladness, Connecticut. After he forms an unlikely bond with an elderly widow from Lithuania, whose house he moves into, he begins working at a fast-food restaurant, HomeMarket, where all of the employees are, like him, searching for some kind of home. The novel brims with feeling for these figures, who, though scorned by society, belong to it nonetheless.” —The New Yorker
“On the surface, The Emperor of Gladness is about people on the margins and how they survive hardship, but it’s also a story of how contradictions often exist in conjunction. War and loss run through the pages of The Emperor of Gladness, but so do love and joy. Estrangement ripples through the novel too, yet The Emperor of Gladness celebrates profound connections . . . Soulful and at times heart-wrenching.” —The Seattle Times
“In [The Emperor of Gladness] Ocean Vuong blends grief, healing, and resilience into a powerful and poetic narrative.” —PBS NewsHour
“The Emperor of Gladness is a truly great novel about work—still an under-acknowledged topic in American fiction. Hard work is supposed to get you somewhere—that’s part of the promise of America. But the pay-off feels much less certain to these characters . . . 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
“An admirable compliment to [Vuong’s] resume of work and widens his stance as an artist that continues to provide irreplaceable commentary on American life, speaking not to his readers, but through . . . The Emperor of Gladness is a reminder that to be an American, no matter how or why you got here, is to be a product of something else. Vuong writes for the very real and individual lives that exist within the blur of an average day . . . A reader’s high is imminent with Vuong . . . His prose often forces you to look up from the page to fully absorb them and remember where you really are.” —Chicago Review of Books
“The Emperor of Gladness takes existentialism to a deeply intimate level, leaving the reader to contemplate what it is to live in a messy, complicated world of wars, addiction, class struggles and good people looking for second chances . . . We piece together the characters’ stories the way you would with real people in real life; through snippets that build atop each other until you can patch together a narrative of the relationships that left the biggest scars and the events that had profound impacts. Vuong achieves more by writing beside his characters than one would by writing a straightforward story about them. True and gritty.” —Associated Press
“Magnificent . . . Vuong is a lauded poet whose paragraphs are shot through with sentences that enthrall and often land with a philosopher’s wisdom and economy . . . In writing [The Emperor of Gladness], Vuong may have joined the ranks of an elite few great novelists, but his perspective remains rooted in that Connecticut town where he got his start.” —Leigh Haber, Los Angeles Times
“Heartbreaking, heartwarming yet unsentimental, and savagely comic all at the same time.” —The Guardian
“Vuong defies easy categorization. His books, whether they deploy line breaks or paragraphs, tend to root around among life’s mundane intimacies for the profound truths of human connection. It’s true here too in Vuong’s second novel.” —NPR.org
“[The Emperor of Gladness] has a tremendous sense of humor. There are moments that made me laugh out loud in the midst of the beauty and the pain and the epic sweep of these individual lives.” —Ari Shapiro, All Things Considered
“Unremittingly gorgeous . . . Vuong again deftly walks a tightrope between despair and hope, heartache and love. For Vuong, fiction is a moral instrument, and he plays it with the practiced hand of a virtuoso . . . [He] vividly evokes the beauty of the depressed, post-industrial town in scene-setting descriptions that channel Thornton Wilder’s ‘Our Town.’ . . . We’re told that no one stops in East Gladness, but readers will be stopped in their tracks by Vuong’s imagery.” —Heller McAlpin, Christian Science Monitor