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. 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, masculinity, and our current American moment—immersed as we are in addiction, violence, and trauma but undergirded by compassion and tenderness.
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.
