Claudia Durastanti is an Italian author whose work delves into complex family dynamics and the search for identity. Her prose is characterized by an introspective style and a keen insight into human relationships. Durastanti often explores themes of alienation and belonging, with her narratives flowing with poetic precision. Her writing is valued for its emotional depth and literary quality.
A work of fiction about being a stranger in your own family and life. Both parents are deaf but couldn't be more different. Into this unlikely yet somehow inevitable union, our narrator is born and comes of age in this strange, and increasingly estranged, household split between a small village in southern Italy and New York City.
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 twenties, the letter unearths a family's history that began before he was born - a history whose epicentre 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. 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, and masculinity. Asking questions central to the American moment, immersed as it is in addiction, violence, and trauma, but undergirded by compassion and tenderness, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is as much about the power of telling one's own story as it is about the obliterating silence of not being heard. With stunning urgency and grace, Ocean Vuong writes of people caught between disparate worlds, and asks how we heal and rescue one another without forsaking who we are. 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