On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeus is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family's history that began before he was born, a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam. At once a witness to the fraught yet undeniable love between a single mother and her son, it is also a brutally honest exploration of race, class, masculinity, and our current American moment - immersed as we are in addiction, violence, and trauma but undergirded by compassion and tenderness. The question of how to survive, and how to make of it a kind of joy, powers the most important debut novel of many years.