WILPF Book Circle

media release: on Zoom, 6 pm for visiting beforehand. Request link at [email protected]

"Ocean Vuong’s novel The Emperor of Gladness begins with an unlikely friendship. A 19-year-old-boy, Hai, stands at the edge of a bridge in Gladness, Connecticut, about to commit suicide. But he is impeded by Grazina, an elderly woman who lives nearby and suffers from dementia. Hai hears the words, “Come back. Come back now!” and mistakenly believes that someone has noticed he is about to jump. (In a comic vein that continues throughout the novel, Grazina is actually calling out to a bedsheet that has blown off her laundry line.)

The Emperor of Gladness is a book in which despair, addiction, unrelenting sadness, generational trauma, and poverty are simply no match for friendship, which renders this sublime novel into a work of art—a sort of literary kintsugi... Vuong never uses any of his characters as a mouthpiece to judge the world outside the book. Instead, he simply presents with fresh eyes a cross-section of America’s poor—and specifically the type of poverty prevalent throughout postindustrial New England. In the tradition of authors like John Steinbeck, Kent Haruf, and Stewart O’Nan, Vuong has courageously penned a novel about people who live in grinding poverty, with more access to drugs and alcohol than education and opportunity...And yet, no amount of failure, pain, disappointment, or porcine murder can usurp the sense of hope evoked by the characters’ attempts to care for one another" - Simon Van Booy, Harvard Review

"Heartbreaking, heartwarming yet unsentimental, and savagely comic all at the same time, The Emperor of Gladness is about just how wobbly things can become." - M John Harrison, The Guardian

Other Resources

Short Interview - 'The Emperor of Gladness' is a beautiful novel about hard work and found family Maureen Corrigan, Fresh Air NPR

Longer Interview - Ocean Vuong on The Emperor of Gladness, SouthBank Centre https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTpGOJtiwtg

Reading Guide Questions - https://www.readinggroupguides.com/reviews/the-emperor-of-gladness/guide