Christopher John Stephens

As we begin the new year, Sampan will run an occasional series of pieces reflecting on literature that has influenced who we were, who we are now, and who we might become as Americans. On July 4, we will celebrate the 250th anniversary of America’s founding. For the purposes of this series, the notion of “literature” include foundational political texts, those that established who we would be as a nation, and those that serve to challenge what we have become.

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.

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 Talented Mr....