Tom Crewe · My Hands in My Face: Ocean Vuong’s Failure

I groaned​ my way through The Emperor of Gladness. I writhed. I felt real despair every time I forced myself to open...

Vol. 47 No. 11 · 26 June 2025 My Hands in My Face Tom Crewe Share on Bluesky Share on Facebook Share Email Print 4838 words The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong . Cape, 397 pp., £20, May, 978 1 78733 540 0 Show More Show More S omething ​ very strange has been going on. Picking up the paperback of Ocean Vuong's first novel, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous , which has now sold more than a million copies, you encounter blurbs the likes of which you've never seen before. 'A marvel,' Marlon James says. Daisy Johnson tells us that 'Vuong is rewriting what fiction is supposed to be' an

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