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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.
"In fluid stream of consciousness, the narrator conveys her external struggles and her inner passion. The result is a one-sided exchange that explodes with feeling." —Publishers Weekly
"Vi Khi Nao's work crosses mediums — poetry, film, and visual art, to name a few — and her intensely lyrical latest novel has a similar range, putting the erotic side by side with political and personal history." —New York Magazine's Vulture
"Queer, sensual, 'literary fantasia.'" —Ms Magazine
"The great polymath Vi Khi Nao's epistolary new novel is, like all of Nao's work, a magisterial and fearless force. The Italy Letters is great current of longing that pulls the reader into the greater depths. Every page is suffused with the ache of longing. I absolutely loved it." —Christian Kiefer, author of The Heart of It All
"For years, Vi Khi Nao has been one of the most interesting and bewitching writers of an English sentence. With this book she expresses all the loneliness and longing and absurdity of what it's been like to live out this past decade in America, in sentences you want to lift off the page, put in your mouth, and swallow down whole." —Madeleine Watts, author of The Inland Sea
This information about The Italy Letters was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Vi Khi Nao was born in Long Khánh, Vietnam, and immigrated to the United States at a young age. Her work includes poetry, fiction, film, and cross-genre collaboration, and has been featured in periodicals such as Conjunctions, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Chicago Review, Glimmer Train, the Bafller, and McSweeney's, and in The Best American Nonrequired Reading anthology. A former Black Mountain Institute fellow, she lives in Iowa City.
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