From The New York Times, this is the interview. I'm David Marquesie.

In a lot of ways, Ocean Vuong's life makes for a classic American success story.

He and his mother came to this country as refugees from Vietnam in 1990 when he was just a small child.

They landed in Hartford, Connecticut, and pretty quickly fell into a hard-scrabble existence

ruled by low-paying work and low expectations.

Until that is, Ocean discovered literature and his own gift for writing.

Vuong is now one of the country's most esteemed poets, winner of a prestigious

MacArthur Fellowship, also known as a Genius Grant, and he's a professor in the creative

writing department at New York University. His debut novel, On Earth, were Briefly Gorgeous,

came out in 2019 and became a bestseller and a bona fide millennial classic. All this,

and he's still only 36 years old.

But there's another side of Wong's story, and that's about the flip side of success and the lingering pain of his mixed-up youth. It's that part of his story, the one that doesn't resolve so

neatly, that lies at the heart of his new novel,

the Emperor of Gladness.

It's a bigger book in every respect than his first,

in a way that makes Vuong kind of nervous about how it'll be received.

I'll say, too, that the book was a launching pad

for what turned out to be one of the most emotionally intense interviews

I think I've ever done.

Here's my conversation with Ocean Vuong.

Thank you for taking the time to do this. I appreciate it.

Thank you, David. Pleasure.

...