Because her dissatisfaction is chronic, Maldon thirsts for her own death. Despite her determination and spectacular rhetoric, suicide continues to reject her for two reasons: the universe and her mother. Vi Khi Nao’s Swimming with Dead Stars is somber until you start laughing, hilarious until you weep, and every single sentence contains the enormity, volatility, and devotion of a poetic and plasmic sun. Its radiance will leave you salty with despair and woefully, regretlessly hot.
—Lily Hoang, author of A Bestiary
“Vi Khi Nao is an absurdist dreamer with a lacerating view of the world and its ills. Swimming with Dead Stars, a philosophical treatise on adjuncting, illness, and relationships, is ferocious and alive, like a monstrous field of technicolor flowers foaming at the mouth.”
—Patrick Cottrell, author of Sorry to Disrupt the Peace
"At first, when reading Swimming with Dead Stars you wonder why the book exists. By the end you wonder why you exist."
—Noah Cicero, author of Las Vegas Bootlegger: Empire of Self-Importance
“All of Vi Khi Nao’s books share a mythopoetic impulse and create together a world in which modes of being and art-making seem suddenly more recognizable in their elaborately evoked never-before-seen-ness. Nao reminds me of Antoine Volodine, not stylistically, but in her forging of genres that seem distinctly her own.”
—Joanna Ruocco, author of Dan
“Maldon is a very human character even as she is also celestial, mineral, elliptical in her orbit.”
—Sarah Blackman, author of Hex
Book cover design: Matthew Revert