As a part of our Pride Celebration, we’re excited to highlight two captivating books by Vi Khi Nao that delve into the complexities of identity, love, and resilience: A Brief Alphabet of Torture and Swimming with Dead Stars.
A Brief Alphabet of Torture, winner of FC2’s Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize, offers stories that are all facets of Nao’s imagination that define the way she views creation, sexuality, violence, and the role of life in an ontological system that relies heavily on cultural, social, and artistic duress. Some stories like “Winter Rose” and “I Love You Me Neither” rise above the boundaries of pain to places of beauty and grace and love, where pain has no place, but make clear how rare such moments appear in life.
“How rare, how wonderful, when a book arrives with the ambition and desire of this one, such a complete set of interests, fully lacking the pitfalls and pratfalls which typically characterize its innovative ilk. The work is animate in its aims, pressing you to go on. Speaking as someone who has seen what it can do, I’d suggest you do as it says.”
—Amelia Gray, author of Isadora, Gutshot, and Museum of the Weird
Swimming with Dead Stars is a hallucinatory meditation on the stars and planets, the precariousness of our 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.
“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“
VI KHI NAO is the author of seven poetry collections and the short story collection, A Brief Alphabet of Torture, winner of the 2016 FC2’s Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize. Her most recent book, Suicide: the Autoimmune Disorder of the Psyche was released in Spring 2023. Her work includes poetry, fiction, film, and cross-genre collaboration.
Follow Vi Khi Nao on her social media channels:
Excerpt: The Flat Woman by Vanessa Saunders