GET WOKE! Reading Group: On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
Wed, Oct 26, 6:00 pm - 7:30 pm
Get Woke! Catskills presents a discussion of Ocean Vuong’s novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (Penguin Press) on Wednesday, October 26 from 6-7:30pm at Bushel. Refreshments will be served.
Registration is not required but is helpful to the organizers. Books can be purchased/ordered at your local independent bookstore. A few of our favorites are The Green Toad in Oneonta, the Lost Bookshop in residency at Bushel, and Blenheim Hill Books in Hobart.
About the Book. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family’s history that began before he was born — a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam — and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation. At once a witness to the fraught yet undeniable love between a single mother and her son, it is also a brutally honest exploration of race, class, and masculinity. Asking questions central to our American moment, immersed as we are in addiction, violence, and trauma, but undergirded by compassion and tenderness, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is as much about the power of telling one’s own story as it is about the obliterating silence of not being heard. With stunning urgency and grace, Ocean Vuong writes of people caught between disparate worlds, and asks how we heal and rescue one another without forsaking who we are. The question of how to survive, and how to make of it a kind of joy, powers the most important debut novel of many years.