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My Hands in My Face

Tom Crewe: Ocean Vuong’s Failure, 26 June 2025

The Emperor of Gladness 
by Ocean Vuong.
Cape, 397 pp., £20, May, 978 1 78733 540 0
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... 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 ...

I did not pan out

Christian Lorentzen: Sam Lipsyte, 6 June 2019

Hark 
by Sam Lipsyte.
Granta, 304 pp., £12.99, March 2019, 978 1 78378 321 2
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... addresses that were then marketed as inspirational pamphlets. Lately the writers Sabina Murray and Ocean Vuong have argued for reframing the workshops they teach as ‘healshops’, perhaps an inevitable development as trauma has become the nation’s dominant subject matter. Heinrich’s cult in The Subject Steve makes sense as an allegory for a writing ...

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