OutBook Book Club

The OutBook Book Club is supported by the Palm Springs Public Library. Selections are chosen by group members and highlight a mix of new LGBTQ+ releases and influential classics.

OutBook meets on the first Wednesday of the month at the LGBTQ+ Community Center of the Desert at at 6:00- 8:00 p.m. There are no meetings in August and September. For questions and information about the OutBook Book Club, please email book club coordinator Hubertus Zegers in advance of the meeting.

OutBook OutLoud is a speakers series connected to OutBook providing opportunities to engage with LGBTQ+ authors nationwide. If you're an author and/or know someone who might be a great speaker—please contact Hubertus Zegers.

Most titles are available as Downloadable Audiobooks and/or eBooks from PSPL.

December 3, 2025

The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong

—Ocean Vuong returns with a bighearted novel about chosen family, unexpected friendship, and the stories we tell ourselves in order to survive

—“Magnificent . . . In writing this book, Vuong may have joined the ranks of an elite few great novelists.” —Leigh Haber, Los Angeles Times

The hardest thing in the world is to live only once…

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 transform 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. 

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