Nghi Vo

An Instant National Bestseller! An Indie Next Pick! This trade paperback edition contains new-to-print content! A Most Anticipated in 2021 Pick for Oprah Magazine | USA Today | Buzzfeed | Greatist | BookPage | PopSugar | Bustle | The Nerd Daily | Goodreads | Literary Hub | Ms. Magazine | Library Journal | Culturess | Book Riot | Parade Magazine | Kirkus | The Week | Book Bub | OverDrive | The Portalist | Publishers Weekly A Best of Summer Pick for TIME Magazine | CNN | Book Riot | The Daily Beast | Lambda Literary | The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel | Goodreads | Bustle | Veranda Magazine | The Week | Bookish | St. Louis Post-Dispatch | Den of Geek | LGBTQ Reads | Pittsburgh City Paper | Bookstr | Tatler HK "A vibrant and queer reinvention of F. Scott Fitzgerald's jazz age classic. . . . I was captivated from the first sentence."—NPR "A sumptuous, decadent read."—The New York Times “Vo has crafted a retelling that, in many ways, surpasses the original."—Kirkus Reviews, starred review Immigrant. Socialite. Magician. Jordan Baker grows up in the most rarefied circles of 1920s American society—she has money, education, a killer golf handicap, and invitations to some of the most exclusive parties of the Jazz Age. She’s also queer and Asian, a Vietnamese adoptee treated as an exotic attraction by her peers, while the most important doors remain closed to her. But the world is full of wonders: infernal pacts and dazzling illusions, lost ghosts and elemental mysteries. In all paper is fire, and Jordan can burn the cut paper heart out of a man. She just has to learn how. Nghi Vo’s debut novel, The Chosen and the Beautiful, reinvents this classic of the American canon as a coming-of-age story full of magic, mystery, and glittering excess, and introduces a major new literary voice.

The Chosen and the Beautiful

fira

Sometimes i forget gay also means happy😭

Mey-Thip Mortensen

"Having a gay time now?" I asked, breaking the silence with a smile.

beautiful beautiful beautiful just utterly beautiful 

You weren't meant to look at people the way that Lieutenant Gatsby looked at Daisy Fay. You couldn't peel your skin back and show them how your heart had gone up in flames, how nothing that had come before mattered and nothing that came afterward mattered as long as you had what you wanted.

oh isnt this one of the most beautiful sentences i have read in a sex scene 

knocking my head back against the cool wet elm bark and letting it dig patterns into my back and into my palms where I reached back to grasp it. I felt pastoral, like some kind of wild nymph come to enchant a human man from his world. 

I blinked, drawing back a little in surprise to see a face round like mine and dark like mine. I felt an immediate rush of recognition and warmth followed by an almost equal amount of repulsion and panic. When you're alone so much, realizing that you're not is terribly upsetting. 

Even after all our time together, I hadn't quite resigned myself to being a couple yet, half of an equation when the male half could somehow continue as a whole without me. He was gone, I felt more myself,

I hoped that those impressions would last in the marble, some kind of permanent snow angel that Daisy and I could leave behind to haunt the house long after we were both gone.

Daisy being a little too real right now for my liking

“Well, what in the world are we going to do with ourselves this afternoon?” she cried. "What are we going to do with ourselves tomorrow, and then for the next thirty years?" 

"You're being morbid," I said, because I mistrusted that look in her eye. "We don't have to do anything. We can just wait for fall. Life starts over again in fall."

He would probably laugh at me for how badly I was doing, and I wanted him to close his capable hand over mine and teach me the way that I should have been taught.

The Chosen and the Beautiful quotes

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