Recommendations
Books Like On Earth We Were Briefly Gorgeous
Best books to read after On Earth We Were Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong
Ocean Vuong's On Earth We Were Briefly Gorgeous is the debut novel by the celebrated Vietnamese-American poet — a letter from a son to his illiterate mother. These recommendations continue the Vuong canon, explore the contemporary immigrant novel tradition, or offer companion reading in the tradition of the lyric novel that uses autobiography to interrogate war, family, addiction, and what it means to become American.
- 1Buy
Night Sky with Exit Wounds
by Ocean Vuong
The essential Vuong companion — his debut poetry collection, covering the same themes as the novel in verse: the Vietnam War, his father's absence, Catholic iconography, male sexuality, and the experience of immigrant displacement.
- 2Buy
The Sympathizer
by Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Pulitzer Prize-winning Vietnam War companion — a communist spy embedded in the South Vietnamese army, Nguyen's formally inventive novel giving the Vietnamese perspective on the war that shaped Vuong's family; both works reckon with what Vietnam did to the people who came to America.
- 3Buy
Pachinko
by Min Jin Lee
The multigenerational immigrant saga companion — a Korean family across four generations in Japan, Lee's epic novel of what it costs to be an outsider in the country where you were born, sharing Vuong's concern with what the first generation sacrifices for the second.
- 4Buy
The House on Mango Street
by Sandra Cisneros
The lyric novel companion — Esperanza Cordero growing up in Chicago, Cisneros's linked-story novel told in luminous prose-poem vignettes; the formal ancestor of Vuong's novel and the other great coming-of-age immigrant lyric in contemporary American literature.
- 5Buy
Giovanni's Room
by James Baldwin
The queer male desire companion — David in Paris, his relationship with Giovanni, and what it costs to refuse to claim your sexuality; Baldwin's short novel sharing Vuong's interest in the shame and the beauty of desire between men, and in how the desire for safety can destroy the things we love.
- 6Buy
Beloved
by Toni Morrison
The multigenerational American trauma companion — Sethe and the ghost of her daughter, Morrison's Pulitzer Prize winner showing what it looks like when historical violence inhabits the body across generations, the model for how Vuong thinks about what the Vietnam War did to his family's bodies.
- 7Buy
The Bluest Eye
by Toni Morrison
The childhood-of-shame companion — Pecola Breedlove in 1940s Lorain, Ohio, wanting blue eyes, Morrison's debut novel about what it does to a child to grow up in a world that treats their body as wrong; shares Vuong's concern with violence against children and the damage that outlasts it.
- 8Buy
Let the Great World Spin
by Colum McCann
The National Book Award companion in lyric polyphony — multiple voices in New York in 1974, the day Philippe Petit walked between the Twin Towers; McCann's novel sharing Vuong's commitment to the lyric sentence and his belief that beauty and violence inhabit the same moment.
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