Swimming with Dead Stars

“Vi Khi Nao’s Swimming with Dead Stars is somber until you start laughing, hilarious until you weep, and every single sentence contains the enormity, volatility, and devotion of a poetic and plasmic sun. Its radiance will leave you salty with despair and woefully, regretlessly hot.”
—Lily Hoang, author of A Bestiary
 
"At first, when reading Swimming with Dead Stars you wonder why the book exists. By the end you wonder why you exist."
—Noah Cicero, author of Las Vegas Bootlegger: Empire of Self-Importance 
 

“All of Vi Khi Nao’s books share a mythopoetic impulse and create together a world in which modes of being and art-making seem suddenly more recognizable in their elaborately evoked never-before-seen-ness. Nao reminds me of Antoine Volodine, not stylistically, but in her forging of genres that seem distinctly her own.”
—Joanna Ruocco, author of Dan
 
“Maldon is a very human character even as she is also celestial, mineral, elliptical in her orbit.”
—Sarah Blackman, author of Hex: A Novel
 

“Vi Khi Nao is an absurdist dreamer with a lacerating view of the world and its ills. Swimming with Dead Stars, a philosophical treatise on adjuncting, illness, and relationships, is ferocious and alive, like a monstrous field of technicolor flowers foaming at the mouth.”
—Patrick Cottrell, author of Sorry to Disrupt the Peace: A Novel
 
“Vi Khi Nao’s Swimming with Dead Stars teems with bodies—corporeal, celestial—churning and circulating, beating, and always costing: money or time or relationships. I felt each word of this book, so potent, bury itself inside me, and I buried myself inside Nao’s text, became entirely a part of her world. It’s that powerful.”
—Sarah Gerard, author of True Love: A Novel

“Nao invites her readers to occupy the world through a masterful deconstruction and reconstruction of her medium.… Nao’s work consistently recalibrates what is capable of being perceived in the blank space between perceptual frames.”
—The Believer