On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
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On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
''On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous'' is the debut novel by Vietnamese-American poet Ocean Vuong, published by Penguin Press on June 4, 2019. An epistolary novel, it is written in the form of a letter from a Vietnamese American son to his illiterate mother. Plot The novel is written in the form of a letter by a young Vietnamese American nicknamed Little Dog, whose life mirrors that of Ocean Vuong. The letter is written to Little Dog's mother Hong, more often called or translated as Rose (''hồng''). The novel has a nonlinear narrative structure. The novel also recounts the life of Little Dog's grandmother, Lan, who escapes an arranged marriage during the Vietnam War and becomes a prostitute. She marries a white American soldier and gives birth to a child, although the father of the child is another man, as Lan was four months pregnant when she met the man who would become her husband. The child is Little Dog's mother, Rose. She is barely literate, having left school at the age ...
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Ocean Vuong
Ocean Vuong (born , ; October 14, 1988) is a Vietnamese American poet, essayist, and novelist. Vuong is a recipient of the 2014 Ruth Lilly/Sargent Rosenberg fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, a 2016 Whiting Award, and the 2017 T.S. Eliot Prize for his poetry. His debut novel, ''On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous'', was published in 2019. He received a MacArthur Grant the same year. Early life Vuong was born in Hồ Chí Minh City, Vietnam. His grandmother grew up in the Vietnamese countryside, and his grandfather was a white American Navy soldier, originally from Michigan. His grandparents met during the Vietnam War, married, and had three children, including Vuong's mother. His grandfather had gone back to visit home in the U.S. but was unable to return when Saigon fell to communist forces. His grandmother separated his mother and aunts in orphanages, concerned for their survival. They fled Vietnam after a police officer came to suspect that his mother was of mixed herit ...
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The Atlantic
''The Atlantic'' is an American magazine and multi-platform publisher. It features articles in the fields of politics, foreign affairs, business and the economy, culture and the arts, technology, and science. It was founded in 1857 in Boston, as ''The Atlantic Monthly'', a literary and cultural magazine that published leading writers' commentary on education, the abolition of slavery, and other major political issues of that time. Its founders included Francis H. Underwood and prominent writers Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and John Greenleaf Whittier. James Russell Lowell was its first editor. In addition, ''The Atlantic Monthly Almanac'' was an annual almanac published for ''Atlantic Monthly'' readers during the 19th and 20th centuries. A change of name was not officially announced when the format first changed from a strict monthly (appearing 12 times a year) to a slightly lower frequency. It was a mo ...
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Jia Tolentino
Jia Angeli Carla Tolentino (born 1988) is an American writer and editor. A staff writer for ''The New Yorker,'' she previously worked as deputy editor of ''Jezebel'' and a contributing editor at ''The Hairpin''. Her writing has also appeared in ''The New York Times Magazine'' and ''Pitchfork''. In 2019, her collected essays were published as '' Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion.'' Early life and education Tolentino was born in Toronto, Ontario, to parents from the Philippines. When she was four, Tolentino, her younger brother, and her parents moved to Houston, Texas where she grew up in a Southern Baptist community. Tolentino attended an evangelical megachurch and a small Christian private school. Tolentino started elementary school early and graduated from high school as her class salutatorian. In 2005, Tolentino enrolled at the University of Virginia as a Jefferson Scholar, studying English, joining a sorority, and participating in an a cappella group called The Vir ...
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Steph Cha
Steph Cha is a Korean American novelist and fiction writer, who has released three novels in the crime fiction genre about her detective protagonist Juniper Song, ''Follow Her Home'' (2013), ''Beware Beware'' (2014) and ''Dead Soon Enough'' (2015). Her most recent book is the stand-alone crime fiction novel, ''Your House Will Pay'' (2019), which won the LA Times Book Award. Background Cha was born in Van Nuys, California in 1986. She subsequently grew up in Encino, California with her mother, father and two younger brothers. She attended Harvard-Westlake School in Studio City. Cha graduated from Stanford University, where she studied English and East Asian Studies, and also completed a Juris Doctor degree from Yale Law School. Work Novels In 2013, Cha published her first Juniper Song mystery, ''Follow Her Home'' (2013) with Minotaur Books, an imprint of St. Martin's Press and Macmillan Publishers. The book has received positive reviews from the ''Los Angeles Times'', ''Kirkus Rev ...
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Los Angeles Times
The ''Los Angeles Times'' (abbreviated as ''LA Times'') is a daily newspaper that started publishing in Los Angeles in 1881. Based in the LA-adjacent suburb of El Segundo since 2018, it is the sixth-largest newspaper by circulation in the United States. The publication has won more than 40 Pulitzer Prizes. It is owned by Patrick Soon-Shiong and published by the Times Mirror Company. The newspaper’s coverage emphasizes California and especially Southern California stories. In the 19th century, the paper developed a reputation for civic boosterism and opposition to labor unions, the latter of which led to the bombing of its headquarters in 1910. The paper's profile grew substantially in the 1960s under publisher Otis Chandler, who adopted a more national focus. In recent decades the paper's readership has declined, and it has been beset by a series of ownership changes, staff reductions, and other controversies. In January 2018, the paper's staff voted to unionize and final ...
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Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Vietnamese people ( vi, người Việt, lit=Viet people) or Kinh people ( vi, người Kinh) are a Southeast Asian ethnic group native to modern-day Northern Vietnam and Southern China (Jing Islands, Dongxing, Guangxi). The native language is Vietnamese, the most widely spoken Austroasiatic language. Vietnamese Kinh people account for just over 85.32% of the population of Vietnam in the 2019 census, and are officially known as Kinh people () to distinguish them from the other minority groups residing in the country such as the Hmong, Cham, or Mường. The Vietnamese are one of the four main groups of Vietic speakers in Vietnam, the others being the Mường, Thổ, and Chứt people. They are related to the Gin people, a Vietnamese ethnic group in China. Terminology According to Churchman (2010), all endonyms and exonyms referring to the Vietnamese such as ''Viet'' (related to ancient Chinese geographical imagination), ''Kinh'' (related to medieval administrative ...
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Time (magazine)
''Time'' (stylized in all caps) is an American news magazine based in New York City. For nearly a century, it was published Weekly newspaper, weekly, but starting in March 2020 it transitioned to every other week. It was first published in New York City on March 3, 1923, and for many years it was run by its influential co-founder, Henry Luce. A European edition (''Time Europe'', formerly known as ''Time Atlantic'') is published in London and also covers the Middle East, Africa, and, since 2003, Latin America. An Asian edition (''Time Asia'') is based in Hong Kong. The South Pacific edition, which covers Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific Islands, is based in Sydney. Since 2018, ''Time'' has been published by Time USA, LLC, owned by Marc Benioff, who acquired it from Meredith Corporation. History ''Time'' has been based in New York City since its first issue published on March 3, 1923, by Briton Hadden and Henry Luce. It was the first weekly news magazine in the United St ...
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The Washington Post
''The Washington Post'' (also known as the ''Post'' and, informally, ''WaPo'') is an American daily newspaper published in Washington, D.C. It is the most widely circulated newspaper within the Washington metropolitan area and has a large national audience. Daily broadsheet editions are printed for D.C., Maryland, and Virginia. The ''Post'' was founded in 1877. In its early years, it went through several owners and struggled both financially and editorially. Financier Eugene Meyer purchased it out of bankruptcy in 1933 and revived its health and reputation, work continued by his successors Katharine and Phil Graham (Meyer's daughter and son-in-law), who bought out several rival publications. The ''Post'' 1971 printing of the Pentagon Papers helped spur opposition to the Vietnam War. Subsequently, in the best-known episode in the newspaper's history, reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein led the American press's investigation into what became known as the Watergate scandal ...
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Ron Charles (critic)
Ron Charles (born 1962 in St. Louis, Missouri) is a book critic at ''The Washington Post''. His awards include the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award Nona Balakian Citation for book reviews, and 1st Place for A&E Coverage from the Society for Features Journalism in 2011. He was one of three jurors for the 2014 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. Charles grew up in Town and Country, Missouri, and graduated from Principia College and Washington University before getting a job as a teacher at John Burroughs School. After a student's parent offhandedly suggested he try making a living as a book reviewer, Charles sent his first book review to ''The Christian Science Monitor'', which eventually hired him. He spent seven years as the ''Monitor''s book review editor and staff critic. In 2005, he was hired by the ''Washington Post''. Sometime after August 2010, with his review of Jonathan Franzen's ''Freedom'', Charles began a series of video book reviews for ''Post'' called "The Totally H ...
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Kirkus Reviews
''Kirkus Reviews'' (or ''Kirkus Media'') is an American book review magazine founded in 1933 by Virginia Kirkus (1893–1980). The magazine is headquartered in New York City. ''Kirkus Reviews'' confers the annual Kirkus Prize to authors of fiction, nonfiction, and young readers' literature. ''Kirkus Reviews'', published on the first and 15th of each month; previews books before their publication. ''Kirkus'' reviews over 10,000 titles per year. History Virginia Kirkus was hired by Harper & Brothers to establish a children's book department in 1926. The department was eliminated as an economic measure in 1932 (for about a year), so Kirkus left and soon established her own book review service. Initially, she arranged to get galley proofs of "20 or so" books in advance of their publication; almost 80 years later, the service was receiving hundreds of books weekly and reviewing about 100. Initially titled ''Bulletin'' by Kirkus' Bookshop Service from 1933 to 1954, the title was ...
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The New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid digital subscribers. It also is a producer of popular podcasts such as '' The Daily''. Founded in 1851 by Henry Jarvis Raymond and George Jones, it was initially published by Raymond, Jones & Company. The ''Times'' has won 132 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any newspaper, and has long been regarded as a national " newspaper of record". For print it is ranked 18th in the world by circulation and 3rd in the U.S. The paper is owned by the New York Times Company, which is publicly traded. It has been governed by the Sulzberger family since 1896, through a dual-class share structure after its shares became publicly traded. A. G. Sulzberger, the paper's publisher and the company's chairman, is the fifth generation of the family to head the pa ...
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Book Marks
Literary Hub is a daily literary website that launched in 2015 by Grove Atlantic president and publisher Morgan Entrekin, American Society of Magazine Editors Hall of Fame editor Terry McDonell, and Electric Literature founder Andy Hunter. Content Focused on literary fiction and nonfiction, ''Literary Hub'' publishes personal and critical essays, interviews, and book excerpts from over 100 partners, including independent presses (New Directions Publishing, Graywolf Press), large publishers (Simon & Schuster, Alfred A. Knopf), bookstores (Book People, Politics and Prose), non-profits (PEN America), and literary magazines (''The Paris Review'', n+1). The mission of ''Literary Hub'' is to be the "site readers can rely on for smart, engaged, entertaining writing about all things books." The website has been featured in ''The Washington Post'', ''The Guardian'', and ''Poets & Writers''. In 2019, Literary Hub launched their new blog, ''The Hub'', alongside LitHub Radio, a "network of ...
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