OutBook Book Club

The OutBook Book Club is supported by The Palm Springs Cultural Center and the Palm Springs Public Library. Selections highlight a mix of new LGBTQ releases and influential classics.

OutBook meets on the first Wednesday of the month on Zoom from 7:00 p.m.-8:30 p.m. (PST). To receive meeting information for the OutBook Book Club, please email book club coordinator Hubertus Zegers in advance of the meeting at hwzegers@gmail.com

Click here to see other selections for the OutBook Book Club.

December 2, 2020

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

—An instant New York Times Bestseller

—Longlisted for the 2019 National Book Award for Fiction, the Carnegie Medal in Fiction, the 2019 Aspen Words Literacy Prize, and the PEN/Hemingway Debut Novel Award

Poet 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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