Bøker av Vi Khi Nao

“Vi Khi Nao's fictional language is full of magical slippages ... an esoteric sadness seeps up through surface deadpan and pizzazz." —Jonathan LethemA mesmerizing epistolary tale of a sensual queer love affair set against the backdrop of Las Vegas' gritty underbelly.The Italy Letters is a slim, powerful shot of literary fantasia from one of America’s best-kept secrets. Long an underground 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 gritty 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. Along the way, the story touches on the immigrant experience, LGBTQIA identity, social class, writing, betrayal, sex, and homesickness. The result is an authentically distinctive piece of writing from a writer on the cusp of wide acclaim.

Two friends wait for god beside an x-ray-cum-time-machine, eating invisible shirts and speaking into their bras like megaphones. They're joined in their theological vigil by a man named after a vegetable and a narcoleptic goat who just might be god. Welcome to the sixth dimension of time, a place where cartoon physics rules and the stage collapses into the page. Bodies fold into fictions. Samuel Beckett switches places with Sarah Kane. Welcome to Waiting for God, a realm where the laws of literature are superseded by apocrypha's fever dream."Vi Khi Nao's latest is a closet drama in which the closet is the mind, the mind's eye, the cosmos, an x-ray, an x-ray machine, an intimacy, a little cell that wants to split in two but can't make up its mind. Is it I, or is it AI? Only the most infinitesimal instrument can tell, and she's not telling."-Joyelle McSweeney, author of Toxicon and Arachne"In Waiting for God, Vi Khi Nao blows up the "who's on first" humor of Beckett's classic, creating a hypertrophic aperture through which all of our current moment-our disappointments, our romances, our violences, and, yes, our deities-pours out. At times it is philosophical, hilarious and dadaistic. It is a bawling, brawling portrait of our time that refuses to ever cohere into the kind of static quality that "portrait of our time" suggests."-Johannes Goransson, author of Poetry Against All: A Diary"Take this x-ray / time machine. This body. Its desire to reconcile its inner and outer selves. It's gender that misses its old gender. An ancient depression. A conversation about God or a goat or a goat God and the myth that we most constantly live in through all dimensions-the one about how and why we go on if no one loves us. If not ourselves. In Waiting for God, Vi Khi Nao brilliantly calls into question all of our beliefs, our many ways of being, with a blood-thinning, acid-slick humor that tremors through a lively wild and sometimes wooly cast of characters as they quite literally roam across the page. Vi Khi Nao's work demands a kind of attention we so rarely give to the multilayered reality written into the body. Is this a play that queers Beckett? Perhaps. Is this a play passionate about the art of carrying story? Its shock collar of pain? Its screaming into the bra cup void of delight? Absolutely."-Jen Rouse, author of Riding with Anne Sexton"Nao's play takes Beckett's canonical Waiting for Godot and masterfully has it perform magic she taught it in secret (via radiography, in the galvanic space between surgeon and patient). You may find yourself flabbergastedly confronted with the cinema of time. It is an absolute delight."-Sarah Burgoyne, author of Because the Sun

Winner of the Nightboat Books Prize for Poetry