Vi Khi Nao is an unstoppable genius. THE VEGAS DILEMMA is zanily transporting and deliriously original. No other writer has ever had me gasping this many times on every page.

— Garielle Lutz, author of Worsted

Vi Khi Nao’s THE VEGAS DILEMMA is a kaleidoscopic jaunt through the lives of the outcasts and artists and lovers who reside in The City of Sin. Nao’s prose is as sharp and strange as a buried blade. THE VEGAS DILEMMA answers the question I’ve been asking myself for years: What would happen if Robert Walser time-traveled to modern day Vegas? You won’t regret reading these stories. 

— Alex McElroy, author of The Atmospherians

The more I read Vi Khi Nao the more I come to feel she is one of those writers with a tinged mind, like a Brautigan, an Inger Christensen. But more I should say these stories find ethics in their mutating formal design and I read these at a moment of exasperation with fiction,  if it cannot stoop to be subsumed by ethics in a crisis. To name the names. Mark Zuckerberg. Kavanaugh. Spit, spit! And part of this ethic, also, is this flexing of wormholes, maybe probed by color, by incendiary metaphor-- a sudden cottontail. Or how each piece here is shaped for (whimsical, grave) escape.

—  Caren Beilin, author of Revenge of the Scapegoat

In conventional fiction, characters are amplified by what they consume, the places that surround them. In THE VEGAS DILEMMA, a novel-in-stories, objects and places become characters themselves—active agents of a state that advertises the possibility of authentic human connection and abundance, but whose destructive drive to consume everything (and everyone) within it finally denies intimacy. People in this hyper-real Vegas objectify and are objectified in turn, becoming, in Nao’s words, “human mirror, human pillowcase, human chopstick, human sweater, human bathrobe.” These strange, compelling and hallucinatory stories expose the dehumanizing and ultimately lonely racial, sexual and class politics of contemporary America.

— Paisley Rekdal, author of Appropriate: A Provocation

With handfuls of Cheerios and memories of bibimbap, Nao’s stories restlessly wander the nocturnal streets, like a Jeanne Moreau in Vegas, desiring and dreading connection and intimacy. Tender and gimlet eyed, with the faintest whiff of desiccated despair, the prose is polished to perfection. A piercing and haunting book.

— Jeffrey DeShell, author of Masses and Motets

 Each of Vi Khi Nao’s stories drops you flatfooted into a new world, finding yourself in a universe at once recognizable and fantastical, poetic and political. Each story lends its hand to a larger whole, but stands alone as an artifact of a place that never quite existed. These stories should be read slowly—each one a puzzle I found myself delighted to solve.

— Adriana E. Ramírez, PEN/Fusion award winning author of Dead Boys

THE VEGAS DILEMMA is a saucy dinner date you wouldn't take for spaghetti. Vi Khi Nao has finally tackled impossibility and solved it. The gaze of this collection is toward a pile of raw and intimate donuts of temporality.

— Ali Raz, author of Human Tetris

THE VEGAS DILEMMA reminds me of riding buses in Santa Fe, or my first morning off in NYC when I foolishly ordered a cup of coffee and started reading War and Peace at a crowded midtown diner with a line that curved into the street. It reminds me of sitting in public spaces, anxiously, expecting that I'd soon be asked to leave or warily aware of some stranger in the periphery or some stranger who sits too close to me, or the stranger who relentlessly abducts my regard and stuffs it in his luggage compartment, where so much pleasure is sought and so much pleasure sold, and skirting this are the Starbucks, the bus stops, the Panda Express, a very specific loneliness.

— Jessica Alexander, author of Dear Enemy,

SYNOPSIS/BOOK DESCRIPTION

in stores September 7, 2021

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.

ISBN: 9781948687423 (paperback)

ISBN: 978-1-948687-53-9 (ebook)