Eliot Prize and a Whiting Award, among other prizes, for his debut poetry collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds. Vuong, who was born on a rice farm outside Saigon in 1988 and emigrated to Hartford in 1990, received the T.S.

His true salvation, however, comes mostly in reading and writing, which cracks open his understanding of his family's history. Abused by his loving but mentally ill mother and tormented by schoolmates, the narrator, Little Dog, eventually finds solace in his first love affair, a tragic relationship with a rough American teenager ravaged by drugs. The result is a fractured narrative of a fractured family, torn by harrowing experiences - those of the mother and grandmother in Vietnam, and of the boy they raised together in Hartford, Conn., in the 1990s. Grappling with the limits of language, he is 'trying to break free' by writing. On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is more about processing and articulating difficult memories than about direct communication. The son knows that chances are slim that his mother, whose grasp of English is limited, will actually read his confessional missive. It takes the form of a young Vietnamese American writer's letter to his illiterate mother - her education having ended at seven, when her school in Vietnam collapsed after an American napalm raid. Ocean Vuong's devastatingly beautiful first novel, as evocative as its title, is a painful but extraordinary coming-of-age story about surviving the aftermath of trauma. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous Author Ocean Vuong

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