The cover of “The Emperor of Gladness” by Ocean Vuong shows a silhouette with sunlight behind it. The novel was released May 13 and follows Vuong’s acclaimed 2019 book “On Earth We’re ...

Ocean Vuong's novel, The Emperor of Gladness, explores intricate ideas in lyrical prose, but struggles with depth and ...

Ocean Vuong’s magnificent and melancholy second novel, "The Emperor of Gladness," is both ode and reproach. It pays tribute to the human ability to act with kindness toward others even when ...

Author Ocean Vuong talks about his new novel, The Emperor of Gladness. It centers on the unlikely friendship between a 19-year-old college dropout and an 82-year-old with dementia.

Ocean Vuong’s new novel follows Hai as he takes care of Grazina and works in a fast-casual restaurant to help support them. Told in moments, “The Emperor of Gladness” takes existentialism to ...

Vuong, 36, has received numerous honors, including the T.S. Eliot Prize and Pushcart Prize for his poetry, a MacArthur Fellowship and a Whiting grant awarded to promising writers.

Ocean Vuong’s “Night Sky With Exit Wounds” was a work of unique brilliance that accomplished something else extraordinarily rare for a poetry collection: In addition to winning both the T.S.

Life’s aftermath ebbs and flows throughout Ocean Vuong’s poetry collection “Time Is a Mother.” An ode to his mother’s passing, Vuong orbits the contours of grief, embedding them into ...

Vuong likes the quiet, domestic rhythms of living in Northampton. Before, he was living on Long Island, commuting two-and-a-half hours each way to teach poetry at New York University.

In addition to being a coming-of-age story, Vuong says the book is also a tribute to the working-class refugees and immigrants like his mother who work in the shadows of American life. Ocean Vuong.

Ocean Vuong: If poetry failed me, I wouldn’t stop it, but I would really need to wise up and get a job to support my family. I was not going to be the person who just tinkered with their hobby ...

So open’s Ocean Vuong’s delirious and star-bright autobiographical novel “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous” (Penguin Press, 242 pp., ★★★★ out of four).