ARTS

There’s something profoundly beautiful about a carefully constructed evocation of failure, despair, togetherness, and survival. When it’s unveiled sensitively, as it’s done so brilliantly in Ocean Vuong’s second novel The Emperor of Gladness, we are assured that the rough ride from the opening pages to the heartbreaking finale is going to be worth our trouble.

Fun Home is a beautiful queer memoir-musical about investigating one’s past and wrestling with the maddening slipperiness of memory. Based on Alison Bechdel’s award-winning graphic memoir, the story follows Alison’s childhood, coming of age, and coming out story as a butch lesbian, as well as her attempts to understand her closeted gay father.

Renee Inomata, a Boston-area attorney, who was highly active ­— oftentimes behind the scenes — in the civil rights and Asian American initiatives, died on Dec. 1.

For Filipino American History month in October, Sampan, in collaboration with the University of Massachusetts-Boston’s Filipino Cultural Club, Hoy! Pinoy!, hosted a live panel of three Filipino American immigrants.

T he notion of a doppelgänger in literature has been used for centuries, with varying degrees of success. Think of the ghost of Hamlet’s father, materializing to haunt the tortured Denmark Prince about crimes transpired and crimes yet to be. Consider Edgar Allan Poe’s William Wilson, in which the double trails our hapless character through his life. There is a doppelgänger in Twain’s Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Dostoyevsky’s The Double, Patricia Highsmith’s The

S ardines is a comedy show about death. A 60-minute one-man show, comedian Chris Grace presents a compelling autobiographical monologue about life and death. He shares his personal experiences with grief, deftly swerving from high-energy moments to vulnerably, sharing about losing family members, as well as his husband and Sardines director Eric Michaud’s cancer experience. These well-executed emotional fluctuations included Grace orchestrating an audience a cappella renditi