On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, by Ocean Vuong
by Emily Nagin
From the Archives: “Art needs to be honest. Sometimes, it’s the only pure honesty you’ll get all day.” Emily Nagin reviews Ocean Vuong’s debut novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous.
From the Archives: “Art needs to be honest. Sometimes, it’s the only pure honesty you’ll get all day.” Emily Nagin reviews Ocean Vuong’s debut novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous.
“In Slimani’s novel, the burden placed upon women to care for children balances alongside the treatment and perceptions of immigrant women. And rendering these issues to subtext, rather than treating them head-on and politically, the narrative forces the reader to become complicit in the shoddy treatment of others for the sake of convenience and creature comforts.”
From the Archives: “The narrator has spent most of her life in other people’s shadows, but through her storytelling asserts an identity that’s no longer tethered to another, one released only by disgrace.”
The secrets George Orwell revealed in Down and Out in London and Paris pale in comparison to the practices in the Camdentown kitchen of The Swan.
