My Hands in My Face

Something​ very strange has been going on. Picking up the paperback of Ocean Vuong’s first novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, which has now sold more than a million copies, you encounter blurbs the likes of which you’ve never seen before. ‘A marvel,’ Marlon James says. Daisy Johnson tells us that ‘Vuong is rewriting what fiction is supposed to be’ and – forgetting the medium – that ‘it’s a privilege to watch.’ ‘Thank you, Ocean Vuong,’ Michael Cunningham chimes, ‘for this brilliant and remarkable first novel.’ Ben Lerner goes big: ‘Vuong ... expands our sense of what literature can make visible, thinkable, felt across borders and generations and genres.’ He must have thought this would be hard to beat. But he hadn’t reckoned on Max Porter, who declares it ‘a masterpiece ... a staggeringly beautiful book’, and what’s more, a ‘huge gift to the world’.