Lively and experimental, Swans in Half-Mourning is a modern retelling of the Grimm fairytale, "The Six Swans." Written in language that is lush, erotic and playful, this novella brings the classic fairytale to fresh, startling life.

Swans In Half-mourning

Nao, VI Khi

Literature & Fiction

Per Second Press

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

Bizarre, sexy, terrifying, heartbreaking and hilarious by turns, Oh, God, Your Babies are So Delicious, is a collection of short stories that are as stylistically diverse as they are wide-ranging in theme. An avocado that is having an abortion. A man erasing himself. Vending machines that sell sex. Meditations on love and loss, motherhood and exile. Eating a baby.Welcome to the exhilarating counter-reality of Vi Khi Nao's language-world, a world where words come to play.

Oh, God, Your Babies Are So Delicious!

Short Stories & Anthologies

Herman & Margaret is the story of two oddly paired individuals who meet at the border between Hoover Dam and Arizona in an attempt to commit suicide. Herman lost his leg in a war. Margaret is obese. Both are confined to wheelchairs. Wheelchair with them on their journey of transformation.

Herman & Margaret

Genre Fiction

Poetry. Asian &amp; 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

Humor & Entertainment

Movies

Black Sun Lit

Blending autobiographical truth with poetic invention, Vi Khi Nao's Fish Carcass is a pointillist portrait that catalogs a tripartite digestion process of being-in-the-world. Opening with "Victuals," sensuous delight cedes to the shock of larger-than-life forces that constrict the everyday in "Spasms," where impersonal paroxysms negotiate the personal terrain of biology with a chorus of organs which sing the particular textures of their experience culminating in "Corporality." At once polyvocal and joyous, terrified and terrifying, the poems in Fish Carcass register expression across multiple thresholds, suturing physical, metaphysical, worldly, otherworldly, human, and nonhuman domains to create a cornucopia of potentialities as sprawling as life itself. Poetry. Asian & Asian American Studies.

Fish Carcass

Poetry

Praise for Vi Khi Nao:
"Here I was allowed to forget for a while that that is what books aspire to tell, so taken was I by more enthralling and mysterious pleasures." —Carole Maso
How do you bear the death of a child? With fishtanks and jellyfish burials, Persephone's pomegranate seeds, and affairs with the neighbors. Fish in Exile spins unimaginable loss through classical and magical tumblers, distorting our view so that we can see the contours of a parent's grief all the more clearly.
Vi Khi Nao was born in Long Khanh, Vietnam. Vi's work includes poetry, fiction, film and cross-genre collaboration. Her poetry collection, The Old Philosopher, was the winner of 2014 Nightboat Poetry Prize. Her novel, Fish In Exile, will make its first appearance in Fall 2016 from Coffee House Press. She holds an MFA in fiction from Brown University.

Fish in Exile

United States

Coffee House Press

Winner of FC2’s Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize 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. Like all of Vi Khi Nao’s acclaimed and award-winning work, A Brief Alphabet of Torture bleeds across many modes and genres—poetry, essay, fiction, drama—and itself almost constitutes a novel of a different kind. Each tale captures the emotional, physical, psychological, political, and artistic concerns that pervade life like breath and which, even when very beautiful, are filled with pain. These stories 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.

A Brief Alphabet of Torture: Stories

Fiction Collective 2

A hypnotic sojourn of planetary proportions through the terrestrial contingencies of bodies, health, poverty, and salvation\nMaldon is an adjunct literature instructor at a prestigious East Coast university, with a deteriorating heart condition and no insurance. She finds herself caught between the demands of her job and the needs of her body, triggering economic and emotional strains that cause her to fantasize about taking her own life. But Maldon, who has pledged to safeguard her mother ever since their arrival in the US on a refugee ship from postwar Vietnam, has vowed to forgo suicide for as long as her mother is living.\nIn time, her heart worsens rapidly, and she ventures cross-country to a place called Cloud for the operation that may save her life. In Cloud, Maldon is joined by old friend planet Neptune, who is hermaphroditic, peculiar, and has agreed to accompany Maldon through the operation.\nSwimming 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.

Swimming with Dead Stars

The Italy Letters

Melville House

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Books by Nao, VI Khi