The Italy Letters
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
“Vi Khi Nao's fictional language is full of magical slippages ... an esoteric sadness seeps up through surface deadpan and pizzazz." —Jonathan Lethem
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Nao (Swimming with Dead Stars) delivers an incisive epistolary novel about a Vietnamese American writer's economic hardship and queer desire. The unnamed narrator, who's broke and desperate after losing her bid for a professorship, writes, but does not send, a series of letters to her poet friend in London. In them, she mixes quotidian details of her everyday life with rants on the pitfalls of academia and sorrowful descriptions of her mother's severe pain from bronchitis and suicidal feelings. Only in these unsent letters does the narrator confess her lust for her friend, as she's worried her feelings are unrequited and doesn't want to damage her friend's marriage. The narrator's missives are full of complex issues lacking easy solutions: her inability to feel an emotional connection in romantic relationships due to being abused; her mother's tendency to make the narrator feel guilty for her suffering; and her precarious living situation with a friend who lets her slide on rent in exchange for sex and household chores. 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.
