“The Interview”: Ocean Vuong was ready to kill. A moment of grace changed his life.

Ocean Vuong's life looks in a soft light and looks like a modern American fairy tale. In 1990 he and his mother came to this country as refugees from Vietnam. They ended up in small town Connecticut and began to devastate through existence that was limited by low -paid work and cultural and personal estrangement. Vuong seemed to be intended to capture the edge of society. Until he discovered literature and his own enormous gift for writing.

Now Vuong is one of the esteemed poets of the country, winner of a prestigious Macarthur scholarship (also known as a “genius scholarship”) and a resident professor in the creative department of New York University. His bitter -sweet debut novel “On Earth We We We Ween Throwous”, a miracle of emotional and narrative compression published in 2019, became a bestseller and over time a nasty millennial classic. All of this, and he is only 36.

But Vuong's story is another side that does not dissolve so well. It is this page of its history that informs his new novel “The Emperor of Gladness”, which will be released on May 13th.

On 400 pages with a large line-up of characters and comedic set pieces and the touch of fast food jobs, Elder Care and the static nature of the most American life, “Emperor” is a larger book than Vuong's first. It also provided the reason for what was one of the most emotionally intense interviews that I have ever done.

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Her new novel is partly based on her experiences in fast food restaurants. Where did you work? I worked in a place called Boston Market and a place called Panera. I lived with my mother and brother in Hud apartments. It was this situation in which her family income was exceeded [a certain minimum]Then you can no longer live there. In summer I worked on a tobacco farm, the 9.50 US dollar in cash, no uncle Sam. As a teenager, you confront this antithesis of American prosperity and upward mobility, where it is: “Do not earn too much money or we will be homeless.” So I went to the Boston market, which is a very eye -opening experience of American life.