Description

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“Vi Khi Nao's fictional language is full of magical slippages ... an esoteric sadness seeps up through surface deadpan and pizzazz." —Jonathan Lethem

A cult-favorite writer weaves 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 a cult 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 an underrated American writer on the cusp of wide acclaim.

About the Author

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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.

Praise For…

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"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

PRAISE FOR PREVIOUS BOOKS:

"Vi Khi Nao's fictional language is full of magical slippages ... an esoteric sadness seeps up through surface deadpan and pizzazz." —Jonathan Lethem

"An unstoppable genius." —Garielle Lutz, author of Worsted

"Prose as sharp and strange as a buried blade." —Alex McElroy, author of The Atmospherians

"Vi Khi Nao [creates] universe at once both recognizabe and fantastical, poetical and political." —Adriana E. Ramírez, author of Dead Boys