The Vegas Dilemma

by Vi Khi Nao

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.

Genres: Short Stories

160 pages, Paperback

Published September 7, 2021

About the author

Vi Khi Nao is the author of many books and is known for her work spanning poetry, fiction, play, film, and interdisciplinary collaborations. Her forthcoming novel, The Italian Letters, is scheduled for publication by Melville House in 2024. In the same year, she will release a co-authored manuscript titled, The Six Tones of Water with Sun Yung Shin, through Ricochet. Recognized as a former Black Mountain Institute fellow, Vi Khi Nao received the Jim Duggins, PhD Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Prize in 2022.
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Reviews

[Dona's Books · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well... I typed out a whole, long review for this book in my miserable android app, which then happily ate the review. So here is the much truncated version.

THE VEGAS DILEMMA is a truly brilliant collection, but a few of the stories get a little abstract, thus not a perfect 5. Fun, clever wordplay like pun and onomatopoeia equals addictive style.

Rating 4.5 rounded up
1st Reading, Finished July 2022
Recommended for fans of contemporary literary fiction, Vonnegut, Leonora Carrington, surrealism

[Vincent Perrone · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the terror of stillness, Vi Khi Nao meets the reader with 27 stories set within the liminal space of our immediate history. Enveloped in the language of entertainment and consumer culture, we are solicited by characters shunned and excluded from the comforts of the supposed 1st world, walking the knife's edge of exile, starving or expanding into unregulated spaces.

Wanderers and voyeurs, online lovers, well-wishers, Elon Musk, and Sin City residents try desperately to realize themselves. Following an inverted hierarchy of need. Escaping the cruelties of American life. Sometimes, as if waking from a dream or just the opposite—sinking further into solipsism. Developing a brutal distrust of the other bodies moving within their orbit. There is kindness. There is wrath.

Still, no one is spared from history. From the Iranian revolution to manifest destiny to the slippages of presidential administrations, and, of course, the history of objects. The chain restaurants and standardized goods—the only solace to a world continuing to fracture. The apologies to the spaces disappearing and the disappeared people occupying them.

[Craig · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Her libido is a finger that grows one long nail, and God invents F [….] k to teach us about informational pornography.”

armadillioc evergreens


a digital flood

Update: the middle passage of This Uzi Could Be a Landscape of Love to The Human Camouflage to Your Sadness is Salt on Salt is particularly brilliant.

The final story is what Suicide must’ve sounded like in 1976.

[Jan Stinchcomb · Rating 5 out of 5]

Vi Khi Nao is one of our most original writers working in English. She thinks and writes like a poet, challenging meaning itself while tackling painful topics. This voyage through Las Vegas and other desolate places filled with society's have-nots will haunt me for a long time.