A 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.

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.

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.

The Vegas Dilemma, a collection of twenty-seven short stories, weaves a vision of contemporary America through the eyes of its outcasts. Set largely in Las Vegas, featuring a recurring character of a footloose, morose woman who likes to eat Cheerios in grocery stores, each story takes up quotidian concerns-staying in Starbucks past closing time, a visit to Hoover Dam, falling in love over Instagram-and mines them for their political and existential undercurrents, which fly off the stories like sparks from a pinwheel. A cycle of stories-Pulverized Oat Wheels, Mother Nature is Belligerent, Symmetry of Provocation, etc.-make use of a vignette style to suture seemingly disparate scenarios and emotions. Thus, in Not Capable of Giving her Leprosy we meet a sexually exploitative American professor at a South Korean University; a reading group who meet in Starbucks to discuss the ethics of eating meat while reading The Vegetarian; palm trees that are mistaken for armadillos; and Walmart identified as a nerve agent. Other stories, such as Your Sadness is Salt on Salt and In My Youth My Father Is Short and Poor, use a sparse first-person voice for more poetic effect. Connected by themes of alienation, bad romance, and microaggressions, The Vegas Dilemma combines the inventiveness of fiction and the richness of everyday life to show that such American tragedies as Trump's ascendency and the Weinstein scandal aren't divorced from everyday interactions, but arise from them.

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.

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.