night sky with exit wounds barnes and noble

The strongest parts of “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous,” where this novel picks up genuine force and has some of the mournful resonance of the Bruce Springsteen song “The River,” arrive in its second half. Each of these lines, and this is only a small selection, is a pebble in the reader’s shoe. “Deep Purple Feeling” could be an alternative title for certain swaths of this novel. “Do you ever wonder if sadness and happiness can be combined, to make a deep purple feeling, not good, not bad, but remarkable simply because you didn’t have to live on one side or the other?” “You once told me that the human eye is god’s loneliest creation.” This novel takes the form of a letter to her. She hits Little Dog too often, once smiting him with a box of Legos. His mother works at a nail salon, smokes Marlboro Reds and has PTSD from the napalm and mortars that fell in Vietnam when she was a child. We learn about his troubled family and youth, and about some occasional ecstasies, sexual and otherwise. He’s a writer in his late 20s, but this story is told largely in retrospect. The narrator of “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous” is known to nearly everyone as Little Dog.

Vuong returns now with his second book and first novel, “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous.” (It’s the kind of title about which Dorothy Parker might have commented, “Speak for yourself.”) Like his first book, this one is semi-autobiographical and speaks solemnly to his experiences as an immigrant and a gay man.

who made his debut in 2016 with “Night Sky With Exit Wounds,” a strong and much-praised book of poems. Ocean Vuong is a young Vietnamese-American writer - born in Saigon, he was raised in Hartford, Conn.

Night sky with exit wounds barnes and noble