Swimming with Dead Stars

A hypnotic sojourn of planetary proportions through the terrestrial contingencies of bodies, health, poverty, and salvation

Maldon is an adjunct literature instructor at a prestigious East Coast university, with a deteriorating heart condition and no insurance. She finds herself caught between the demands of her job and the needs of her body, triggering economic and emotional strains that cause her to fantasize about taking her own life. But Maldon, who has pledged to safeguard her mother ever since their arrival in the US on a refugee ship from postwar Vietnam, has vowed to forgo suicide for as long as her mother is living.

In time, her heart worsens rapidly, and she ventures cross-country to a place called Cloud for the operation that may save her life. In Cloud, Maldon is joined by old friend planet Neptune, who is hermaphroditic, peculiar, and has agreed to accompany Maldon through the operation.

Swimming with Dead Stars is a hallucinatory meditation on the stars and planets, the precariousness of our existence, the cruel inequities of labor and healthcare, chickens and ice cream, and the grace that comes from enduring the physical and psychic pain wrought by pernicious social forces that enslave us all.


Author: VI Khi Nao
Publisher: F2c
Published: 02/22/2022
Pages: 206
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.60lbs
Size: 8.40h x 5.40w x 0.80d
ISBN13: 9781573661935
ISBN10: 1573661937
BISAC Categories:
- Fiction | Literary

About the Author
Vi Khi Nao is the author of the short story collections A Brief Alphabet of Torture and The Vegas Dilemma, the novel Fish in Exile, and the poetry collection, A Bell Curve Is A Pregnant Straight Line.