The Italy Letters

Vi Khi Nao

Random House Publishing Services

How does this writer, Vi Khi Nao, even exist?  She puts herself on a wood stove. Stretches her fingers. Stretches her back. Stretches her toes. She reaches out to the cutting board. She places herself on the cutting board. She slants herself on the cutting board. She lifts the hammer. She lifts it high. As high as her eyebrows. She lifts her skirt up. She lifts her skirt with the unused hand. She lifts it up for the view. She lifts the skirt. She lifts the hammer. The hammer falls... Wait: correction.  With a hatchet. She takes herself apart with a hatchet.  She puts herself on the wood stove....

The Vanishing Point of Desire

Fugue State Press

A cross between the genre of newspaper personals and the self-display of online dating, Human Tetris comprises a series of calls for lovers: whimsical, serious, mournful, thirsty, trite, and true. Written as a collaboration between two very different voices, with each entry addressed not to but through the other, Human Tetris is an obviously personal project that seeks not so much connection as an understanding of the shape of desire.

Human Tetris

Ali Raz

1111 Press LLC

Somewhere between a journal and a report, a question and an answer, Suicide: The Autoimmune Disorder of the Psyche takes up the "only serious problem in philosophy" and submits it to the only kind of scrutiny proper to it: the personal. In arriving at this "personal" account, however, Nao detours through decidedly un-private, public cultural touchpoints-the lives of celebrities, religion, television shows, sporting events-and in doing so lays bare how even this most subjective of phenomena grows out of an endless encounter with the world. Race has a part in this encounter. So does migration. As does money. Growing out of these entanglements, queer affinities bud and bloom in this text-which, made up of pen-and-ink drawings, photographs, and Nao's playful spin on pilish, is simultaneously constrained and unconstrained-to become the bonds that can make one want to live on.

Suicide: The Autoimmune Disorder of the Psyche

11:11 Press

Two friends wait for god beside an x-ray-cum-time-machine, eating invisible shirts and speaking into their bras like megaphones. They're joined in their theological vigil by a man named after a vegetable and a narcoleptic goat who just might be god. Welcome to the sixth dimension of time, a place where cartoon physics rules and the stage collapses into the page. Bodies fold into fictions. Samuel Beckett switches places with Sarah Kane. Welcome to Waiting for God, a realm where the laws of literature are superseded by apocrypha's fever dream.\nVi Khi Nao's latest is a closet drama in which the closet is the mind, the mind's eye, the cosmos, an x-ray, an x-ray machine, an intimacy, a little cell that wants to split in two but can't make up its mind. Is it I, or is it AI? Only the most infinitesimal instrument can tell, and she's not telling. 
-Joyelle McSweeney, author of Toxicon and Arachne\nIn Waiting for God, Vi Khi Nao blows up the "who's on first" humor of Beckett's classic, creating a hypertrophic aperture through which all of our current moment-our disappointments, our romances, our violences, and, yes, our deities-pours out. At times it is philosophical, hilarious and dadaistic. It is a bawling, brawling portrait of our time that refuses to ever cohere into the kind of static quality that "portrait of our time" suggests. 
-Johannes Goransson, author of Poetry Against All: A Diary\nTake this x-ray / time machine. This body. Its desire to reconcile its inner and outer selves. Its gender that misses its old gender. An ancient depression. A conversation about God or a goat or a goat God and the myth that we most constantly live in through all dimensions-the one about how and why we go on if no one loves us. If not ourselves. In Waiting for God, Vi Khi Nao brilliantly calls into question all of our beliefs, our many ways of being, with a blood-thinning, acid-slick humor that tremors through a lively wild and sometimes wooly cast of characters as they quite literally roam across the page. Vi Khi Nao's work demands a kind of attention we so rarely give to the multilayered reality written into the body. Is this a play that queers Beckett? Perhaps. Is this a play passionate about the art of carrying story? Its shock collar of pain? Its screaming into the bra cup void of delight? Absolutely. 
-Jen Rouse, author of Riding with Anne Sexton\nNao's play takes Beckett's canonical Waiting for Godot and masterfully has it perform magic she taught it in secret (via radiography, in the galvanic space between surgeon and patient). You may find yourself flabbergastedly confronted with the cinema of time. It is an absolute delight. 
-Sarah Burgoyne, author of Because the Sun

Waiting for God

Arts & Photography

Performing Arts

Apocalypse Party

Eighteen international writers respond to the open-ended period of social distancing, closures, and illness caused by Covid-19. Compiled during the initial lockdown in Europe, this special collection is a meteoric publishing project with contributions from some of the most exciting and innovative authors working today.\nMeditating on notions of distance and closeness, sameness and alterity, extinguishing and kindling, Tools for Extinction considers how a common pause might give rise to new modes of domesticity and shift experiences of time. What gestures and actions are we willing to perform to make ourselves, and each other, feel at ease or at work? What tools and objects are useful, or unprecedentedly useless, to us in the process? And as our species' trademark proclivity for projecting ourselves into the future is disrupted, might we come to see the buildings, animals, plants, and foodstuffs around us in a new light?\nThe anthology takes its name from Steven Brand's Whole Earth Catalog, a 1960s counterculture compendium of product reviews, essays, and articles on the themes of self-sufficiency, ecology, and alternative education. By giving access to tools , a new social order and a more sustainable Earth was imagined.\nCompiled, edited and with a foreword by Denise Rose Hansen.

Tools for Extinction

Literature & Fiction

Olivia Sudjic

Enrique-Vila-Matas

Joanna Walsh

Naja Marie Aidt

Jeaan-Baptiste del Amo

Christina Hesselholdt

Mara Coson

Jakuta Alikavazovic

Contemporary

Lolli Editions

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Books by Vi Khi Nao