Dua Lipa's Service95 Book Club Reveals November Monthly Read

Dua Lipa’s Service95 Book Club has revealed details about November’s Monthly Read: “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous” by Ocean Vuong. The Service95 Book Club will offer exclusive content from Dua and Ocean throughout the month on service95.com and across socials.

“This beautiful book had me hooked right at the title,” Dua shares. “And while it is a novel, Ocean Vuong’s poetic language dances on every page. It’s told in the form of a letter written by a young man called Little Dog to his illiterate Vietnamese mother as he flits between past and present to make sense of their relationship and his upbringing. The story unfolds between the paddy fields of Vietnam to the shopping malls and tobacco fields of Hartford, Connecticut, slowly revealing the layers of intergenerational trauma left by war and family violence.”

Dua continues, “Addressing class, race and the immigrant experience, it’s also a queer coming of age story. At the heart of the book is Little Dog’s teenage love affair with Trevor, a white working-class boy whose ultimate self-destruction with drugs can be traced to the toxic masculinity that surrounds him. As much as it is a commentary on the dark side of the American Dream, it is also a tender testament to the unbreakable love between a mother and son. Little Dog’s mother tells him: ‘You have a bellyful of English. You have to use it.’ And my goodness, does he use it,” Dua ends.

In Dua’s author Q&A with Ocean, they discuss the ways the women in his family have fought for autonomy amid oppression, the multi-generational trauma of the Vietnam War, the epidemic of male suicide, and his response to his book being banned in certain states.

In addition to the interview, Ocean has shared a reading of an excerpt from “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous” and has revealed his reading list and accompanying playlist inspired by the book. This month’s context piece delves into Vietnam’s history covering topics from the rise of communism to the American withdrawal. Readers can also check out the provided discussion questions to encourage their own conversations and analyses of the book.

Dua’s Service95 Book Club is the latest offering from her Service95 platform, which consists of the At Your Service podcast and the flagship Service95 newsletter. Service95 has been praised by The Guardian as "some of the most thought-provoking short-form cultural writing you can find,” and the podcast has been lauded by The Sunday Times, Vogue and Vulture. In addition, Spotify named it one of the Best Podcasts of 2022 and praised Dua as “an incredibly thoughtful interviewer with a genuine interest in people, social movements, and the arts.”

You can follow Service95 on socials and YouTube to get the latest, and subscribe to the newsletter here to stay in the loop on upcoming monthly reads.

About Ocean Vuong

If you’ve read Ocean Vuong, you’ll know that in whatever form he writes, he’s a poet. His collection “Night Sky With Exit Wounds” (2016) won the TS Eliot Prize, and his latest collection is “Time Is A Mother” (2022). His New York Times bestselling novel ”On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous” was nominated for the 2019 National Book Award for Fiction in the same year he was awarded a MacArthur ‘Genius’ Grant. In 2020, the book won the American Book Award, the New England Book Award, and the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award. Ocean had noisy roommates and hid in his closet to write this first novel. ‘For a gay writer, the irony is not lost on me, but I thought… what was once a prison I’m going to turn into a portal.’ His work has been featured in The Atlantic, Harper’s Bazaar, The Nation, The New Republic, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. Born in Saigon, Vietnam, Ocean was raised in Hartford, Connecticut in a working-class family of nail-salon and factory labourers. You will find echoes of this in “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous.” Ocean is a Professor on the NYU Creative Writing Program.

About Dua Lipa

3x GRAMMY and 7x BRIT Award-winning global pop powerhouse Dua Lipa continues to be one of pop music’s leading forces with the release of her third album, Radical Optimism. Upon release, the album went straight to No. 1 in 11 countries, including the UK where it became the biggest album debut from a UK female artist in 2024 and garnered the highest week one sales from a UK female artist since 2021. In the US, the album debuted at No. 1 on Billboard’s Top Album Sales chart and No. 2 on the Billboard 200 chart, marking Dua’s biggest sales week yet. The New York Times named it a Critic’s Pick and hailed it as “an album of nonstop ear candy,” along with Variety, who declared it “a joyous blast of pop savvy,” The New Yorker, who praised, “the instrumentation is a gleaming and impenetrable expanse, and the main attraction is Lipa,” and Vogue, who raved it is “a summery, self-assured slice of pop brilliance…[and] catchy as hell.” Following her electric set headlining Glastonbury’s 2024 Pyramid Stage, Dua has now embarked on her Radical Optimism World Tour, which will continue into 2025 and includes two shows at Wembley Stadium that sold out immediately.

Following its release in 2020, Dua's certified platinum sophomore album Future Nostalgia became the longest running top 10 album by a female artist on the Billboard 200 in 2021. The GRAMMY Award-winning album spawned multiple worldwide hit singles, with “Levitating” earning certified diamond status and the title of Billboard’s No. 1 Hot 100 Song of 2021.

Dua has found superstar status on stage and off, thanks to her many passions outside of music. 2022 saw Dua launch Service95, a global style, culture and society editorial platform that now comprises a weekly newsletter, the Service95 book club and the Dua Lipa: At Your Service podcast, which has been lauded by The Sunday Times and The Guardian, and was named one of the Best Podcasts of 2022 by Spotify. Having graced every major fashion magazine worldwide from Vogue and Elle to W and Dazed, Dua added "designer" to her resume in 2023 when she co-designed Versace's "La Vacanza" collection alongside Donatella Versace herself, which Vogue deemed "the hottest collaboration of the summer."

Dua’s eponymous 2017 debut album is certified platinum, spawned six platinum tracks, and made her the first female artist in BRIT Awards history to pick up five nominations in a single year. Dua has a total of 10 GRAMMY nominations, with three wins for Best Pop Vocal Album, Best New Artist and Best Dance Recording. Additionally, she earned nominations at the Golden Globes and Critics Choice Awards for her hit song “Dance The Night” from the box office sensation Barbie. Across platforms globally, she has amassed over 45 billion streams and holds the record for being the first female artist to have two albums with over 10 billion streams each on Spotify.

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