Vi Khi Nao

The Vegas Dilemma, a collection of twenty-seven short stories, weaves a vision of contemporary America through the eyes of its outcasts. Set largely in Las Vegas, featuring a recurring character of a footloose, morose woman who likes to eat Cheerios in grocery stores, each story takes up quotidian concerns-staying in Starbucks past closing time, a visit to Hoover Dam, falling in love over Instagram-and mines them for their political and existential undercurrents, which fly off the stories like sparks from a pinwheel. A cycle of stories-"Pulverized Oat Wheels," "Mother Nature is Belligerent", "Symmetry of Provocation", etc.-make use of a vignette style to suture seemingly disparate scenarios and emotions. Thus, in "Not Capable of Giving her Leprosy" we meet a sexually exploitative American professor at a South Korean University; a reading group who meet in Starbucks to discuss the ethics of eating meat while reading The Vegetarian; palm trees that are mistaken for armadillos; and Walmart identified as a nerve agent. Other stories, such as "Your Sadness is Salt on Salt" and "In My Youth My Father Is Short and Poor," use a sparse first-person voice for more poetic effect. Connected by themes of alienation, bad romance, and microaggressions, The Vegas Dilemma combines the inventiveness of fiction and the richness of everyday life to show that such American tragedies as Trump's ascendency and the Weinstein scandal aren't divorced from everyday interactions, but arise from them.

The Vegas Dilemma

Daisuke Shen

Funeral

Poetry. Asian & Asian American Studies. Film. SHEEP MACHINE is a textual inscape, a poetically painted nonfictional pasture where mechanical violence and visceral fear coalesce into a kind of science prosody, a post-human panorama whose beauty lies in the ruins of reality it depicts. Influenced by Leslie Thornton's film of sheep feeding in a field as a conveyor belt of cable cars ascend and return from a mountain in the Swiss Alps, Vi Khi Nao takes perception into tumultuous terrains, into a pastoral-celestial void in which temporality is transcended, progress is a bourgeois invention, and god is a liability for our life spent in hunger and grazing. Vi Khi Nao's SHEEP MACHINE is grace said at the ontological last supper.

Sheep Machine

An unflinching and riveting meditation on the pain that attends every facet of existence--love and sacrifice and intimacy and beauty--a biography of torture.

Stories

A Brief Alphabet of Torture

The Autoimmune Disorder of the Psyche

Suicide

This is what happens when a powerful princess falls in love with a woman and God sits in the grass to count stars. Princes, birds, and glass bottle labyrinths wrap around a spiral of Roman numerals.

Swans In Half-Mourning

Naja Marie Aidt

Christina Hesselholdt

Olivia Sudjic

Enrique Vila-Matas

Joanna Walsh

Jakuta Alikavazovic

Jeaan-Baptiste del Amo

Mara Coson

Tools for Extinction

A surreal, dream-like account of an achingly sensual love affair from a queer Vietnamese American novelist and cult favorite

The Italy Letters is a slim, powerful shot of literary fantasia from one of America’s best-kept secrets. Long a cult favorite, visionary writer Vi Khi Nao weaves an unforgettable and highly distinctive story of a love affair suffused with longing, erotic passion, and heartbreak – all while painting a picture of the scabby underside of Las Vegas.This beautiful and mesmerizing novel by a queer Vietnamese American writer is a brilliant and unclassifiable work of fiction that takes the form of a series of letters written by the unnamed narrator to her lover in Italy … part of a stream-of-consciousness narrative that is by turns poignant, bawdy, funny, and disturbing – and often beautifully poetic. The story touches, obliquely but powerfully, on the immigrant experience, LGBTQIA identity, social class in the academy, writing, betrayal, sex, and homesickness. The narrator is in the process of caring for her declining mother, who is both deteriorating in health but remains imperious – not perhaps an uncommon dynamic, and one that is sketched with great compassion, humor, and yes, exasperation. The result is an authentically distinctive piece of writing from an underrated American writer on the cusp.

The Italy Letters

Noah Cicero

Poems

Bipolar Cowboy

Human tetris

Fish in Exile

War Is Not My Mother

Oh, God, Your Babies Are So Delicious

That Woman Could Be You

A tragic first date. An evicted fetus. A restaurant called Sapph?. The flu. Argiope spiders. A room. The sea. Body parts as clothing. A long poem. A short one. A long one. Flipping like Morse signals, the poems in this collection gather under the pregnant arc of the bell curve in four quadrants that gestate desire. They scatter and sprawl across the page, or shrink in demure bundles, become pen-and-ink drawings, become lists, perform a termite insurrection against style.

A Bell Curve Is a Pregnant Straight Line

SOCK!

Filled by turns with ecstatic beauty and aching sadness, The Vanishing Point of Desire is a poetic meditation on beauty, love and longing. A nameless narrator - a young girl - moves through a landscape shorn down to its most potent details, searching as we all are for an elusive love. Does it exist at all?

The Vanishing Point of Desire

Jeremy Hoevenaar

Georg Trakl

Kyle Coma-Thompson

Garett Strickland

Paul Éluard

Laura Walker

Elizabeth Robinson

Gary J. Shipley

Róbert Gál

Vahé Godel

Serge Pey

Jennifer Soong

Christine Shan Shan Hou

Je Baer

E. L. Æ. Elæ

Adam Fagin

Patricia Hartland

Heikki Huotari

M. C. Hyland

Rachel Levitsky

Clarissa Macedo

Geoffrey Olsen

Branko Ve Poljanski

Lindsey Webb

Rachael Guynn Wilson

Memory As a Morgue: Lacunae

Vestiges_05

Winner of the Nightboat Books Prize for Poetry

The Old Philosopher

"Swimming with Dead Stars by Vi Khi Nao is a novel that follows adjunct literature instructor Maldon on a cross-country journey to undergo a medical procedure to repair a heart condition. The novel is a hallucinatory meditation on the stars and planets, the precariousness of human existence, the cruel inequities of labor and healthcare, chickens and ice cream, and the grace that comes from enduring the physical and psychic pain wrought by pernicious social forces that enslave us all"--

A Novel

Swimming with Dead Stars

Vi Khi Nao

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