Vi Khi Nao – författare

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.

A couple loses their child in this poetic and devastating novel in which grief reaches “enthralling and mysterious pleasures” (Carol Maso). A couple named Catholic and Ethos struggle with the loss of their child. How? 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. “The result is a novel that forges a new vocabulary for the routine of grief, as well as the process of healing” (Publishers Weekly, starred review).

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 hypnotic sojourn of planetary proportions through the terrestrial contingencies of bodies, health, poverty, and salvation;Maldon 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.In 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.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.

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 hypnotic sojourn of planetary proportions through the terrestrial contingencies of bodies, health, poverty, and salvation   Maldon 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.   In 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.   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.

AWARD-WINNING CO-AUTHORSPEN OPEN BOOKS AWARD WINNERPEN USA NONFICTION BOOK AWARD FINALISTTen short stories written by Lily Hoàng and Vi Khi Nào explore a range of styles from love stories to speculative fiction and fairy tales.In this inventive collaboration, Hoàng and Nào blend Vietnamese, English, and Vietlish, creating a fresh, dynamic voice that captures the complexity of the Vietnamese-American experience. Their stories dive into themes of generational trauma, identity, and cultural clash, offering everything from love stories pieced together from memory, to folklore and fantasy, to post-apocalyptic worlds where Vietnamese-American identities are reimagined.Timber and Lụa is playful, moving, and full of surprises. The authors experiment with language and translation, showing how meaning can shift and change between cultures. Released on the fiftieth anniversary of the Fall of Saigon, this collection is both a celebration of diasporic voices and a tribute to the power of storytelling across generations.

AWARD-WINNING CO-AUTHORSPEN OPEN BOOKS AWARD WINNERPEN USA NONFICTION BOOK AWARD FINALISTTen short stories written by Lily Hoàng and Vi Khi Nào explore a range of styles from love stories to speculative fiction and fairy tales.In this inventive collaboration, Hoàng and Nào blend Vietnamese, English, and Vietlish, creating a fresh, dynamic voice that captures the complexity of the Vietnamese-American experience. Their stories dive into themes of generational trauma, identity, and cultural clash, offering everything from love stories pieced together from memory, to folklore and fantasy, to post-apocalyptic worlds where Vietnamese-American identities are reimagined.Timber and Lụa is playful, moving, and full of surprises. The authors experiment with language and translation, showing how meaning can shift and change between cultures. Released on the fiftieth anniversary of the Fall of Saigon, this collection is both a celebration of diasporic voices and a tribute to the power of storytelling across generations.

The Italy Letters is a slim, powerful shot of literary fantasia from one of America's best-kept secrets. Long a cult favourite, 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 scabby 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. The story touches, obliquely but powerfully, on the immigrant experience, LGBTQIA identity, social class in the academy, writing, betrayal, sex, and homesickness. The narrator is in the process of caring for her declining mother, who is both deteriorating in health but remains imperious - not perhaps an uncommon dynamic, and one that is sketched with great compassion, humour, and yes, exasperation. The result is an authentically distinctive piece of writing from an underrated writer on the cusp.

Using the numerical structure of pi (3.1415), Mechanophilia is a collaborative epic poem by the American poet Vi Khi Nao and Canadian poet Sarah Burgoyne that follows the omniscient voluble conversations and complaints of ad hoc biblical characters as they attempt to make sense of themselves on an ordered, disordered planet. Nao and Burgoyne, who have never met, began this project after discovering a mutual love of math and unending collaborations. This book, the first of four volumes presently completed, represents the first 1,000 digits of pi. Anachronistic in proportion, this work attempts to queer and rewrite myths in precise, restrictive numerical pi chronology, yet its verses remain free and ludic, time-travelling at will and often looping in present-day figures (Elon Musk, Lady Gaga, Cai Guo-Qiang, Phoebe Philo, Virgil Abloh, Donald Trump) and concerns. Feministic, irreverent, and supremely loquacious, Mechanophilia presents infinity as something reachable yet unrelated to linear time.

A series of poetic remixes, WAR IS NOT MY MOTHER might be considered a form of spirit possession. Each poem in this manuscript takes up another poet’s work— a selection that ranges from Lorca to CD Wright, Hồ Xuân Hương to Sappho, Agha Shahid Ali to Ishrat Afreen— and alters its DNA, infusing it with an other idiolect. This is an idiolect of pleasure (the wordplay, puns, and cadence of the Vietnamese language) and of pain (the long shadow of the Vietnam war in the lives of those who survived, barely survived, and became refugees). Like any possessing spirit, WAR IS NOT MY MOTHER speaks in tongues: using others’ words to articulate a personal pain. Shorn of their original context and content, the poems in this collection— mutant-hybrids who retain a trace of their skeleton while dressed in entirely other clothes— become a play of voices that call into question notions of authenticity and self in poetic production, a postmodern twist for the classical craft.

Fifty years after the end of the Vietnam War, literary voices of the Vietnamese-American diaspora as well as Vietnam-based authors speak to the experience of those who left and those who stayed inTHE COLORS OF APRIL, a collection of new short fiction curated by award-winning translators and editors Quan Manh Ha and Cab Tran. For much of the twentieth century, Vietnam played an outsized role on the global stage, charting the destinies of superpowers and reshaping the world's politics. Now fifty years after the end of the Vietnam War comes an anthology of fiction that finally speaks to the global Vietnamese experience: voices of both those who left and those who stayed, what was gained and lost in the half century since, andfor the generations that followedwhat it means to be Vietnamese. More than two dozen distinct literary voices are featured in this collection, includingViet Thanh Nguyen(Pulitzer Prize winner,The Sympathizer),Andrew Lam(PEN/Beyond Margins Award winner,Perfume Dreams),Barbara Tran(Lannan Foundation Award winner,In the Mynah Birds Own Words),Vu Tran(Whiting Award winner,Dragonfish) and many more. The stories are as diverse in style, tone, and subject matter as the ancestral lands of the Vietnamese people. From the rubble of the Ancient Citadel in Qung Tr to the makeshift orphanages outside Si Gn, from Palo Alto to a tony Lincoln Park apartment in Chicago, the narratives straddle continents and generations, the political as well as the personal. But what they share is much greater than their differences. They speak to a common language, to a culture steeped in history and myth and storytelling that vividly captures the enduring spirit of the Vietnamese people. EditorQuan Manh Hais Professor of English at the University of Montana and the co-translator ofOther Moons: Vietnamese Short Stories of the American War and Its Aftermath, among other titles. Co-editorCab Tranholds an MFA from University of Michigan's Helen Zell Writers' Program. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared inVagabond: Bulgaria's English Monthly,Black Warrior Review,The Iconoclast, and elsewhere. He teaches fiction for Gotham Writers Workshop. In 2023, Ha and Tran co-translated and co-edited Bo Ninh'sH Ni at Midnight. Complete list of contributors in alphabetical order:BO Thng, Thuy DINH, Th Diu Ngc, Anvi HONG, HONG Phng Mai, LI Vn Long, Andrew LAM, L Phng Anh, L V Trng Giang, LU V Ln, Vi Khi NAO, NG Th Vinh, Annhien NGUYEN, NGUYN Minh Chuyn, NGUYN Huy Cng, NGUYN Th Kim Ha, NGUYN M N, Phng NGUYN, NGUYN Thu Trn, NGUYN c Tng, Viet Thanh NGUYEN, Kevin D. PHAM, Tuan PHAN, Gin TO, Barbara TRAN, Elizabeth TRAN, TRN Th T Ngc, Vu TRAN, VN Xng, Christina VO, V Cao Phan, and VNG Tm