Ocean Vuong's Reading List

"I think this is why the work of Toni Morrison's Beloved was so important to me because I saw in Beloved a first generation testimony... felt so powerful to me and I learned so much from that book."

"Teach Us to Outgrow our Madness, by Kenzaburo Oe."

"The Melancholia of Class, by Cynthia Cruz."

"Thomas Merton's Seeds of Contemplation. Other than that, I don't really reread books, even ones I deeply admire."

"For a much more diverse thinking to fiction craft, I'd recommend Meander, Spiral, Explode, by Jane Alison."

"For a much more diverse thinking to fiction craft, I'd recommend Living by Fiction, by Annie Dillard, who is also a poet."

"Toni Morrison's Sula."

"There is not more I can say about Beloved that has not been said much more concisely and eloquently. When I first came to the book, I discovered something I did not expect coming in: that, along with the myriad things that Beloved is and does, it is also a refugee narrative. The novel positions survival as an act of creation, particularly how mothers who witnessed a generation of a horrific trauma acquire the power of protection through love—even if it means committing the ultimate act of res..."

"This hybrid book (a novel in verse) taught me what can happen when a fictive story is contextualized through other texts, where it can collaborate, argue with, and celebrate the original while also gaining its own life. In Carson’s case, it was the recasting and expansion of the classical myth of Geryon. But what’s more, it uses Geryon’s anecdotal life in a larger male-dominated narrative as an epicenter, thereby decentralizing the Greek original into Carson’s contemporary vision of rural que..."

"I have always felt that Melville was the writer who enacted Whitman’s decree for American multiplicity in ways far richer and complex than Whitman did himself. A book that simply refuses to compromise, that employs the autobiographical gaze to suggest radical modes of queerness, polytheism as progressive self-knowledge, expansive meditations on whiteness, both in regards to the whale’s purity and to race, Moby-Dick forges the allegory of the hunt as a doomed American quest for self-knowledge...."

"The novel that Baldwin claims he ‘had to write if [he were] ever to write anything else’ is a masterclass on how potent and vital an autobiographical text can be for a writer of color. In a literary culture that often casts the debut as arriving out of a serendipitous phenomenon, the autobiographical novel, as evidenced by Baldwin, serves as a map of one’s journey towards art. It says, essentially, that a writer of color does not arrive at the literary table, as is often believed, in spite th..."