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The Emperor of Gladness
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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By:
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Ocean Vuong
About this listen
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 alter 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.
©2025 Ocean Vuong (P)2025 Penguin AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Story
From Pulitzer finalist, MacArthur Fellowship recipient, and bestselling author of Swamplandia! and Vampires in the Lemon Grove Karen Russell comes a gripping dust bowl epic about five characters whose fates become entangled after a storm ravages their small Nebraskan town The Antidote opens on Black Sunday, as a historic dust storm ravages the fictional town of Uz, Nebraska. But Uz is already collapsing—not just under the weight of the Great Depression and the dust bowl drought, but beneath its own violent histories.
By: Karen Russell
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Stag Dance
- A Novel & Stories
- By: Torrey Peters
- Narrated by: Lee Osorio, Briggon Snow, Eileen Noonan, and others
- Length: 9 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In Stag Dance, the titular novel, a group of restless lumberjacks working in an illegal winter logging outfit plan a dance that some of them will volunteer to attend as women. When the broadest, strongest, plainest of the axmen announces his intention to dance as a woman, he finds himself caught in a strange rivalry with a pretty young jack, provoking a cascade of obsession, jealousy, and betrayal that will culminate on the big night in an astonishing vision of gender and transition.
By: Torrey Peters
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Time Is a Mother
- By: Ocean Vuong
- Narrated by: Ocean Vuong
- Length: 1 hr and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In this deeply intimate second poetry collection, Ocean Vuong searches for life among the aftershocks of personal and social loss, embodying the paradox of sitting in grief while being determined to survive beyond it. Shifting through memory, and in concert with the themes of his novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Vuong contends with the meaning of family and the cost of being the product of an American war in America. At once vivid, brave, and propulsive, these poems circle fragmented lives to find both restoration as well as the epicenter of the break.
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solomn
- By Camille on 09-05-24
By: Ocean Vuong
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Dream Count
- A Novel
- By: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
- Narrated by: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Sandra Okuboyejo, A'rese Emokpae, and others
- Length: 19 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Chiamaka is a Nigerian travel writer living in America. Alone in the midst of the pandemic, she recalls her past lovers and grapples with her choices and regrets. Zikora, her best friend, is a lawyer who has been successful at everything until—betrayed and brokenhearted—she must turn to the person she thought she needed least. Omelogor, Chiamaka’s bold, outspoken cousin, is a financial powerhouse in Nigeria who begins to question how well she knows herself. And Kadiatou, Chiamaka’s housekeeper, is proudly raising her daughter in America—but faces an unthinkable hardship.
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The Dream Hotel
- A Novel
- By: Laila Lalami
- Narrated by: Frankie Corzo, Barton Caplan
- Length: 11 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Sara has just landed at LAX, returning home from a conference abroad, when agents from the Risk Assessment Administration pull her aside and inform her that she will soon commit a crime. Using data from her dreams, the RAA’s algorithm has determined that she is at imminent risk of harming the person she loves most: her husband. For his safety, she must be kept under observation for twenty-one days. The agents transfer Sara to a retention center, where she is held with other dreamers, all of them women trying to prove their innocence from different crimes.
By: Laila Lalami
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The Names
- A Novel
- By: Florence Knapp
- Length: 11 hrs
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In the wake of a catastrophic storm, Cora sets off with her nine-year-old daughter, Maia, to register her son's birth. Her husband, Gordon, a local doctor, respected in the community but a terrifying and controlling presence at home, intends for her to name the infant after him. But when the registrar asks what she'd like to call the child, Cora hesitates...
By: Florence Knapp
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The Antidote
- A Novel
- By: Karen Russell
- Narrated by: Elena Rey, Sophie Amoss, Mark Bramhall, and others
- Length: 11 hrs
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
From Pulitzer finalist, MacArthur Fellowship recipient, and bestselling author of Swamplandia! and Vampires in the Lemon Grove Karen Russell comes a gripping dust bowl epic about five characters whose fates become entangled after a storm ravages their small Nebraskan town The Antidote opens on Black Sunday, as a historic dust storm ravages the fictional town of Uz, Nebraska. But Uz is already collapsing—not just under the weight of the Great Depression and the dust bowl drought, but beneath its own violent histories.
By: Karen Russell
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Stag Dance
- A Novel & Stories
- By: Torrey Peters
- Narrated by: Lee Osorio, Briggon Snow, Eileen Noonan, and others
- Length: 9 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In Stag Dance, the titular novel, a group of restless lumberjacks working in an illegal winter logging outfit plan a dance that some of them will volunteer to attend as women. When the broadest, strongest, plainest of the axmen announces his intention to dance as a woman, he finds himself caught in a strange rivalry with a pretty young jack, provoking a cascade of obsession, jealousy, and betrayal that will culminate on the big night in an astonishing vision of gender and transition.
By: Torrey Peters
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Audition
- A Novel
- By: Katie Kitamura
- Narrated by: Traci Kato-Kiriyama
- Length: 8 hrs
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Two people meet for lunch in a Manhattan restaurant. She’s an accomplished actress in rehearsals for an upcoming premiere. He’s attractive, troubling, young—young enough to be her son. Who is he to her, and who is she to him? In this compulsively enjoyable, brilliantly constructed novel, two competing narratives unspool, rewriting our understanding of the roles we play every day–partner, parent, creator, muse–and the truths every performance masks, especially from those who think they know us most intimately.
By: Katie Kitamura
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Tilt
- A Novel
- By: Emma Pattee
- Narrated by: Ariel Blake
- Length: 6 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Annie is nine months pregnant and shopping for a crib at IKEA when a massive earthquake hits Portland, Oregon. With no way to reach her husband, no phone or money, and a city left in chaos, there’s nothing to do but walk.
By: Emma Pattee
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Universality
- A Novel
- By: Natasha Brown
- Narrated by: NORMA BUTIKOFER, Anushka Chakravarti, Clare Corbett, and others
- Length: 4 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Late one night on a Yorkshire farm, in the midst of an illegal rave, a young man is nearly bludgeoned to death with a solid gold bar. An ambitious young journalist sets out to uncover the truth surrounding the attack, connecting the dots between an amoral banker landlord, an iconoclastic newspaper columnist, and a radical anarchist movement that has taken up residence on the farm. She solves the mystery, but her viral exposé raises more questions than it answers.
By: Natasha Brown
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My Friends
- A Novel
- By: Fredrik Backman
- Length: 21 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Most people don’t even notice them—three tiny figures sitting at the end of a long pier in the corner of one of the most famous paintings in the world. Most people think it’s just a depiction of the sea. But Louisa, an artist herself, knows otherwise and she is determined to find out the story of these three enigmatic figures. Twenty-five years earlier, in a distant town, a group of teenagers find refuge from their difficult home lives by spending their days laughing and telling stories out on a pier.
By: Fredrik Backman
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On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
- A Novel
- By: Ocean Vuong
- Narrated by: Ocean Vuong
- Length: 7 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Poet Ocean Vuong’s debut novel is a shattering portrait of a family, a first love, and the redemptive power of storytelling. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late 20s, the letter unearths a family’s history that began before he was born - a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam - and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation.
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Beautifully written, but painful.
- By NB on 06-10-19
By: Ocean Vuong
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Katabasis
- A Novel
- By: R. F. Kuang
- Length: 12 hrs
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Alice Law has only ever had one goal: to become one of the brightest minds in the field of Magick. She has sacrificed everything to make that a reality: her pride, her health, her love life, and most definitely her sanity. All to work with Professor Jacob Grimes at Cambridge, the greatest magician in the world. That is, until he dies in a magical accident that could possibly be her fault. Grimes is now in Hell, and she’s going in after him. Because his recommendation could hold her very future in his now incorporeal hands and even death is not going to stop the pursuit of her dreams….
By: R. F. Kuang
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Atmosphere
- A Love Story
- By: Taylor Jenkins Reid
- Length: 14 hrs
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
The new novel by the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo and Daisy Jones & The Six.
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Wild Dark Shore
- A Novel
- By: Charlotte McConaghy
- Narrated by: Cooper Mortlock, Katherine Littrell, Saskia Maarleveld, and others
- Length: 9 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Dominic Salt and his three children are caretakers of Shearwater, a tiny island not far from Antarctica. Home to the world’s largest seed bank, Shearwater was once full of researchers, but with sea levels rising, the Salts are now its final inhabitants. Until, during the worst storm the island has ever seen, a woman mysteriously washes ashore.
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Twist
- A Novel
- By: Colum McCann
- Narrated by: Colum McCann
- Length: 11 hrs
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Anthony Fennell, an Irish journalist and playwright, is assigned to cover the underwater cables that carry the world’s information. The sum of human existence—words, images, transactions, memes, voices, viruses—travels through the tiny fiber-optic tubes. But sometimes the tubes break, at an unfathomable depth.
By: Colum McCann
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Dream State
- A Novel
- By: Eric Puchner
- Narrated by: MacLeod Andrews
- Length: 13 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Cece is in love. She has arrived early at her in-laws’ beautiful lake house in Salish, Montana, to finish planning her wedding to Charlie, a medical student with a brilliant future. Charlie asks Garrett, his best friend from college, to officiate, though Cece can’t imagine anyone less appropriate for the task; Garrett doesn’t believe in love, much less marriage. But as she spends time with Garrett, and his gruff mask slips, her long-held expectations for her life with Charlie begin to crumble, her feelings for Garrett—haunted by a tragic event from his past—become impossible to bury.
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An Enthralling Listen
- By Regina on 02-20-25
By: Eric Puchner
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The Sunflower Boys
- A Novel
- By: Sam Wachman
- Length: 12 hrs
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In many ways, twelve-year-old Artem’s life in Chernihiv, Ukraine, is normal. He spends his days helping on his grandfather’s sunflower farm, drawing in his sketchbook—a treasured gift from his father, who works in America—and swimming in the river with his little brother, Yuri. In secret, Artem has begun wrestling with romantic feelings for his best friend, Viktor. In a country where love between two boys is unthinkable, Artem has begun to worry that growing up, his life will never be normal.
By: Sam Wachman
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Immaculate Conception
- A Novel
- By: Ling Ling Huang
- Length: 8 hrs
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Enka meets Mathilde in art school. Mathilde is a dizzyingly talented yet tortured artist whose star is on the rise—and Enka, struggling to make art that feels original, is immediately drawn to her. The two strike up an intense bond that soon turns codependent. But when Mathilde’s fame reaches new heights, Enka becomes desperate to keep her best friend close—no matter the cost.
By: Ling Ling Huang