Ocean Vuong

Ocean Vuong returns with a bighearted novel about chosen family, unexpected friendship, and the stories we tell ourselves in order to survive

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.

A NOVEL

The Emperor of Gladness

Lindsay

The hardest thing in the world is to live only once.

 But it’s beautiful here, even the ghosts agree.

he was only alive inside pieces of mistakes that gravity had collected into a life raft called the present.

Below the scene was printed, in block letters, the command Don’t let your child be swallowed by depression. Underneath this was the name of a pill, Luminkind, that was to rescue your kid from this natural disaster of the mind. Hai wondered if he was too old to take something made for children. At what point does childhood sadness become adult sadness anyway? Does the tsunami get larger as the figure grows? Was his wave already twice the size of the one in the poster?

What does it do to your mind to see “your people” die so vastly that you can’t even tell that they are not, in fact, your people at all?

Grace McCarter

“She wrote poems too, my little Lina. Better than Robert Frost, if you can believe it. 

What did he do, anyway? Look at trees and feel bad? That’s no way to live.”

The Emperor of Gladness quotes

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