The Newcomb-Tulane College Reading Project, the common intellectual experience for the entering first-year class, engages students and faculty from different backgrounds and academic interests through the reading and discussion of a selected book.

Incoming students are tasked with reading the book over the summer, before they arrive on campus. During New Student Orientation, new students discuss the book with a Tulane faculty member as their first intellectual conversation at Tulane. Students will then have numerous opportunities to continue their engagement with the book themes through the Kylene and Brad Beers Reading Project Keynote Lecture and various other campus initiatives and programming.

2023 Reading Project Selection

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong is the 2023 NTC Reading Project selection for the incoming Class of 2027.

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 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.

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 our American moment, immersed as we are 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.