Ocean Vuong, a Vietnamese refugee who grew up in Connecticut, set his latest novel in the state, penning a poetic tale about refugees barely keeping their heads above water.

BJ wore cut with the strawberry Starbursts Russia was always sucking on. The Emperor of Gladness is a truly great novel about work — still an under-acknowledged topic in American fiction.

Vuong is so committed to his notion of transcendent pseudo-lyric prose that he doesn’t even tell us what animal he means us ...

Hai is 19 and suicidal. Grazina is 81 and living alone with dementia. So when she strikes a deal to house him so they can keep each other company in ...

The follow-up to his first prose endeavor – the heralded 2019 novel “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous” – “The Emperor of Gladness,” released May 13, marks Vuong’s first formal prose ...

Ocean Vuong’s new novel, “The Emperor of Gladness” (Penguin Press) is moving on a number of levels. It has characters you think about when you’re away from them. The writing is exemplary. New England ...

Oprah Winfrey stopped by "CBS Mornings" on Tuesday to reveal her latest book club selection, "The Emperor of Gladness" by Ocean Vuong. It is an epic story about love and loneliness, following an ...

In his new novel, "The Emperor Of Gladness," Ocean Vuong describes characters who work together in a Connecticut fast food restaurant as people bound by nothing but toil in a tiny kitchen ...

The Southern California Independent Bookstore Bestsellers list for Sunday, June 22, 2025, including hardcover and paperback ...

The Emperor of Gladness, like its predecessor, explores what Vuong has called in a recent interview, "the loneliness of class movement." Sprawling where its predecessor was compact, The Emperor of ...

This is one vision of a "found family" that Vuong presents in The Emperor of Gladness and its miraculous lack of sentimentality surely owes something to the fact that he lived a similar story himself.