A Masterful Night for Fiction - Ocean Vuong and E.M. Tran

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This event will be held in Georges Auditorium at Dillard University. Hosted by Baldwin & Co Bookstore.

Ocean Vuong returns with a bighearted novel about chosen family, unexpected friendship, and the stories we tell ourselves in order to survive
One late summer evening in the post-industrial town of East Gladness, Connecticut, nineteen-year-old Hai stands on the edge of a bridge in pelting rain, ready to jump, when he hears someone shout across the river. The voice belongs to Grazina, an elderly widow succumbing to dementia, who convinces him to take another path. Bereft and out of options, he quickly becomes her caretaker. Over the course of the year, the unlikely pair develops a life-altering bond, one built on empathy, spiritual reckoning, and heartbreak, with the power to transform Hai’s relationship to himself, his family, and a community on the brink.
Following the cycles of history, memory, and time, The Emperor of Gladness shows the profound ways in which love, labor, and loneliness form the bedrock of American life. At its heart is a brave epic about what it means to exist on the fringes of society and to reckon with the wounds that haunt our collective soul. Hallmarks of Ocean Vuong’s writing—formal innovation, syntactic dexterity, and the ability to twin grit with grace through tenderness—are on full display in this story of loss, hope, and how far we would go to possess one of life’s most fleeting mercies: a second chance.

“A sprawling tale of self-discovery and chosen family, The Emperor of Gladness is a deeply sympathetic look at a disenfranchised young man learning how to care for himself and others.” —TIME, A Must-Read Book of the Year
“Vuong’s protagonist, Hai, is a drug-addicted college dropout living in the fictional town of East Gladness, Connecticut. After he forms an unlikely bond with an elderly widow from Lithuania, whose house he moves into, he begins working at a fast-food restaurant, HomeMarket, where all of the employees are, like him, searching for some kind of home. The novel brims with feeling for these figures, who, though scorned by society, belong to it nonetheless.” —The New Yorker
“Magnificent . . . Vuong is a lauded poet whose paragraphs are shot through with sentences that enthrall and often land with a philosopher’s wisdom and economy . . . In writing [The Emperor of Gladness], Vuong may have joined the ranks of an elite few great novelists, but his perspective remains rooted in that Connecticut town where he got his start.” —Leigh Haber, Los Angeles Times
“On the surface, The Emperor of Gladness is about people on the margins and how they survive hardship, but it’s also a story of how contradictions often exist in conjunction. War and loss run through the pages of The Emperor of Gladness, but so do love and joy. Estrangement ripples through the novel too, yet The Emperor of Gladness celebrates profound connections . . . Soulful and at times heart-wrenching.” —The Seattle Times
“In [The Emperor of Gladness] Ocean Vuong blends grief, healing, and resilience into a powerful and poetic narrative.” —PBS NewsHour
“The Emperor of Gladness has all the poetic meditations and lyricism of Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, but with a lovable cast of found family characters that practically leap off the page.” —USA Today

Ocean will be in conversation with local New Orleans author EM Tran

Ocean Vuong is the author of the critically acclaimed poetry collections Night Sky with Exit Wounds and Time Is a Mother, as well as the New York Times bestselling novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. A recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship and the American Book Award, he was born in Saigon, Vietnam, and currently splits his time between western Massachusetts and New York City. The Emperor of Gladness is his latest novel.

E. M. Tran is the author of the debut novel, Daughters of the New Year, and was the 2025 One Book One New Orleans citywide selection. Her stories, essays, and reviews can be found in Oxford American, Literary Hub, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Harvard Review Online, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. She completed an MFA at the University of Mississippi and a PhD in Creative Writing at Ohio University. She was born, raised, and currently lives in New Orleans, Louisiana with her family.

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