9 d. ago Morgan Wallen review – country’s biggest star sings of whiskey, heartbreak and more whiskey

Morgan Wallen review – country’s biggest star sings of whiskey, heartbreak and more whiskey  The Guardian

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9 d. ago Morgan Wallen review – country’s biggest star sings of whiskey, heartbreak and more whiskey

Roundhouse, LondonPlaying a rare intimate show as new album I’m the Problem tops the charts, the laid-back American singer is hardly groundbreaking – but there are funny, moving momentsMorgan Wallen’s world domination continues apace. The country singer’s last two albums spent 29 weeks at the top of the US chart. This week his latest, fourth offering, I’m the Problem, had the biggest opening week of the year so far in the US as well as going straight in at No 1 in the UK.This prodigious achievement may owe a little to a canny release strategy: streaming metrics mean that longer albums often chart higher, and I’m the Problem weighs in at a staggering 37 tracks. Equally, all 37 are in the US singles chart this week, setting a new record – Wallen is a commercial phenomenon, the biggest country star to cross over to mainstream success since Taylor Swift. Continue reading...

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3 w. ago Ocean Vuong's new novel, 'The Emperor of Gladness,' is Winfrey's latest book club pick

Oprah Winfrey’s latest book club pick is a new novel from Ocean Vuong, one of the country’s most admired young writers

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3 w. ago 'A modern day Jane Austen': The best Literary Fiction out now

Claire Allfree reviews the best Literary Fiction out now.

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3 w. ago The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong review – heartbreak and hope

The follow-up to On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a tale of precarity and connection in smalltown ConnecticutOcean Vuong’s second novel is a 416‑page tour of the edgeland between aspirational fantasy and self-deception. It opens with a long slow pan over the fictional small town of East Gladness, Connecticut, beginning with ghosts that rise “as mist over the rye across the tracks” and ending on a bridge where the camera finds a young man called Hai –“19, in the midnight of his childhood and a lifetime from first light” – preparing to drown himself. There’s an almost lazy richness to the picture: the late afternoon sun, the “moss so lush between the wooden rail ties that, at a certain angle of thick, verdant light, it looks like algae”, the junkyard “packed with school buses in various stages of amnesia”.His poetic credentials established, the author of the bestselling autofictional On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous gives narrative its head. Instead of jumping from the...

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4 w. ago ‘Buddhism and Björk help me handle fame’: novelist Ocean Vuong

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous made him a literary superstar. Now the Vietnamese American author is exploring his working-class roots in an ambitious follow‑upThere are three kinds of family, muses the novelist and poet Ocean Vuong. There’s the nuclear family, “which often we talk about as the central tenet of American life”. There’s the chosen family, “the pushback”, the community and friendships built by people who have been rejected by their parents, often because of their sexuality or gender identity. And then there’s the family we talk about much less frequently, but spend most of our waking hours within – our colleagues, or what Vuong describes as “the circumstantial family around labour”.Vuong’s forthcoming second novel, The Emperor of Gladness, encompasses them all. There’s its 19-year‑old hero Hai’s relationship with his mother, a poor Vietnamese immigrant who believes that he has fulfilled her desperate aspirations for him by going to university, when he has actually...

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