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10:00 am - 11:00 am
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This month our featured book will be “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous” by Ocean Vuong.
The instant New York Times Bestseller • Nominated for the 2019 National Book Award for Fiction
“A lyrical work of self-discovery that’s shockingly intimate and insistently universal…Not so much briefly gorgeous as permanently stunning.” —Ron Charles, The Washington Post
Ocean Vuong’s debut novel is a shattering portrait of a family, a first love, and the redemptive power of storytelling
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.
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We will meet in the upstairs Gallery space from 10 – 11 am, and our Morning Book Club is open to one and all, whether or not you are a Morristown or Morris Township resident. Please feel free to join us even if you didn’t get a chance to finish the book. Copies of the book are reserved for Book Club members at the main circulation desk. Ask a librarian for a copy. If you have any questions about this book club, please email morristownreaders@mmt.mainlib.org with the subject line “Morning Book Club”.
We look forward to seeing you then!