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The Reading List: The Books That Inspired Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

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Ocean Vuong, the author of On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous – Dua’s Monthly Read for November – shares the books that inspired his lyrical masterpiece. Written in the form of a letter by a young boy called Little Dog to his illiterate Vietnamese mother, Vuong crafts a poetic exploration of masculinity, race and intergenerational trauma left by war and family violence. “This book is one of the most radical approaches to the novel that I’ve read, one where time-honoured narrative decrees for cohesion, fluidity, character development, plot and arc are refused in order to privilege a necessary, orchestrated sense of disorientation as a method of enacting displacement, trauma and national and private grief. The novel gave me courage to stop seeing historical trauma as something that has to be refurbished in order to achieve ‘fine art’, and more so that fracture, even incomprehensibility, can be a powerful conscious mode of storytelling; one that interrogates colonialist gauges of successful

The Reading List: The Books That Inspired Ocean Vuong’s On … The Reading List The Reading List: The Books That Inspired Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous November 5, 2024 Ocean Vuong , the author of On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous – Dua’s Monthly Read for November – shares the books that inspired his lyrical masterpiece. Written in the form of a letter by a young boy called Little Dog to his illiterate Vietnamese mother, Vuong crafts a poetic exploration of masculinity, race and intergenerational trauma left by war and family violence. Dictee by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha “This book is

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