Poured Over: Nghi Vo on The Chosen and the Beautiful

“There’s an intense pleasure in viewing the flaws of the people around you and saying, I’m not a part of that, even if maybe at the beginning you want to be or even maybe you still do, but you learn to come from where you stand. And that’s part of what Jordan is doing. She’s very comfortable in her discomfort…” Nghi Vo won the Hugo Award for Debut Novella with The Empress of Salt and Fortune, the first volume of her Singing Hills Cycle. Nghi’s remixed and remastered The Great Gatsby for her new paperback, The Chosen and the Beautiful, and she joins us on the show to talk about re-imagining an American classic with a layer of magic, taking Gatsby out of the male gaze and putting Jordan Baker in the center of everything, the art of Vietnamese paper cutting, interesting arc of her career (starting with the slush pile), her next novel, Siren Queen (based on the life of Anna May Wong) and more with Poured Over’s host, Miwa Messer. And we end the episode with a TBR Topoff featuring book recommendations from Margie and Marc.

Featured Books:

The Chosen and the Beautiful by Nghi Vo

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Empress of Salt and Fortune by Nghi Vo

Siren Queen by Nghi Vo

Pussy, King of the Pirates by Kathy Acker

Poured Over is produced and hosted by Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang. New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional bonus episodes Saturdays) here, and on your favorite podcast app.

Full transcript for this episode of Poured Over:

Barnes & Noble: I’m Miwa Messer, I’m the host and producer of Poured Over and I’m so excited to have Nighi Vo on the show with us today. Her new novel The Chosen and the Beautiful is just out in paperback. It is our April Speculative Fiction pick of the month. And oh, you guys, it’s The Great Gatsby only with fantasy, and witches and demons and a Vietnamese American protagonist even though you know her name, Jordan Baker, you do not know this Jordan Baker. So I’m very excited to have Nghi here on the show. So we can dive right in. Absolutely. You have built this book around The Great Gatsby, but a lot of happening. So let’s set it up.

Nghi Vo: So we’ve got The Chosen and the Beautiful and almost 100 years ago, F. Scott Fitzgerald published The Great Gatsby, which we now know it as an a great American classic. When it first came out, it was a book that was vastly disappointing to himself to his family to his publicist. And it wasn’t until World War ll, when it entered into a program to get literature to American soldiers, they became the sort of runaway classic that we know of today. And because it was a book that I read at a very formative stage in my life, it’s always lived in my head and no one in my head has lived more loudly and more with more determination than playing Jordan Baker, who is a minor character in The Great Gatsby. And when the opportunity came up a couple years ago, for me to pitch something to my agent, Diana Fox, I basically pitch Chosen and the Beautiful, which is a queer and fantasy reimagining of The Great Gatsby starring a Vietnamese American protagonist. I jumped at that chance. And then about five months later, I had The Chosen and the Beautiful and now you have too.

B&N: Wait a minute you wrote this book in five months?

NV: I did the reading for it in one and a half to two. I did the writing in three months.

B&N: Wow. Okay, wait a minute, what? It’s 260 pages!

NV: Well, you just use have to write like, what? 1000 words a day and you mostly got it. It’s a very short book. I mean, it’s got that going for it too, I double Fitzgerald’s word count. But it’s still a very small book.

B&N: True, but it really really moves. So we see Jordan who’s narrating everything. She’s sort of the Nick Carraway of your version of Gatsby.

NV: Nick Carraway was my first unreliable narrator, you never forget your first and that’s where Jordan comes from.

B&N: So Nick is here, of course, and Daisy and Tom Buchanan, of course. And absolutely Gatsby himself and the Wilsons. So readers of Gatsby will be familiar with the cast. But one of the fun things that you do in this book that I was not totally expecting and it is a shout out I think to Kathy Acker, and her work especially Pussy, King of the Pirates, which is her retelling of Treasure Island. There’s a lot of the original Gatsby text woven into your story. And can we just talk about your influences for a second?

NV: Kathy Acker with Pussy, King of the Pirates is absolutely one of them. Just in terms of sheer off the wall vibes and storytelling. Kathy Acker just had it in spades, Neil Gaiman, Angela Carter, there’s been a lot of interesting stuff about how to market this book and how to brand it. And I just keep saying, you know, no, I’m a fantasy writer. I’m a genre writer. It’s like, if I can’t just fix all my problems by having a dragon breathe fire on everything. I don’t know what to do narratively, of course, Zen Cho, Cixin Liu, basically, whatever I’m picking up at the time. Reading from the 1920s was a lot of fun, but also putting in all the fancy influence as well for The Chosen and the Beautiful.

B&N: Okay, so you know, you’re starting with Jordan, because she’s sort of the most open to interpretation. I mean, if you’re playing with Nick or Gatsby, or Daisy, or even Tom, to a certain extent, there are parameters within Gatsby that you chose to work with, which is, I mean, this is your story, even though you lean on Gatsby.

NV: Part of the reason for that is that so I did a couple close readings of The Great Gatsby before I started, of course, and I was focusing on Jordan there, I still have this copy of The Great Gatsby, where I have basically posted noted every one of Jordans appearances and everything she says, and I realized that functionally narratively, the book doesn’t work without Jordan at all. And she is there literally as a plot device. She is having secret conversations with Jay Gatsby she is getting Daisy to hold secret meetings. And the more I read it, and the more I read into it, the more I realized, okay, so either Jordan Baker is playing her own game, making her own calls, or she’s Stone Cold evil, because who sets up your best friend with a long lost love of her life and doesn’t tell her which is what Nick assumes. And once again, Nick gets to this basically escape hatch. Because if we understand that Nick is an unreliable narrator, who doesn’t know everything, no matter how much he sounds like he would like to, there are things that don’t make sense from a character perspective. And that’s where Jordan comes in and gets to actually speak and say, no, no, we were just lying to Nick. And that’s fine. A lot of people lie to Nick.

B&N: And Nick doesn’t really know that a lot of people lie to him.

NV: He wishes they wouldn’t.

B&N: Yeah, yeah, there’s that he’s a little dreamy on that front. But at the same time, he doesn’t do anything with the information.

NV: Oh, no, no, he’s bad as that.

B&N: Kind of stares at people like he’s a Labrador.

NV: It must be very nice to be stared out like that. I think it’s a very forgiving gaze. He’s got going on a lot of the time.

B&N: Jordan though, is a Vietnamese woman. Her parents presented as she was adopted, but there is a suggestion that maybe she was stolen.

NV: I like to think it’s more of a success. shouldn’t but yes, it is, throughout the chosen the beautiful, we have the story that Jordan is telling us. And we have the story that she has been telling herself all of her life. And the fact that she doesn’t quite realize it’s a story that she’s been told as well. It’s very important for her to get her story straight, both for herself and how she presents herself. But that is a narrative that she learns to challenge during the course of the book, where does she come from and why and what the people have been telling her her whole life which Jordan, even at the age of basically 21 sees herself as a very keen operator. She’s very smart. She’s very savvy. And I remember thinking how smart I was at 21, you know, and I wasn’t. So this is part of that growing up process, especially when you come from a background like she does.

B&N: Well, and that’s the thing, her parents have quite a lot of money. She’s insulated in a lot of ways because of who her family is in their community. And yet, she’s never quite comfortable. And one of the things about Gatsby that I do appreciate is the fact that it’s always been a story of outsiders. And Jordan is really the ultimate outsider, even though her parents are.

NV: There is a pleasure, at least to me in discomfort in never being quite settled, which seems paradoxical. There’s this great Oscar Wilde quote, where he says that when I care about someone very much, I make their name a secret, I never speak it, you know, and he keeps it very much to himself. And you understand that as a gay man. And part of that is survival. There’s an intense pleasure in viewing the flaws of the people around you and saying, I’m not a part of that, even if maybe at the beginning you want to be or even maybe you still do, but you learn to come from where you stand. And that’s part of what Jordan is doing. She’s very comfortable in her discomfort and in using it as a weapon.

B&N: I know you said you were talking to your agent and your agents. And no, this is the one this is the one but it feels like you’ve been walking around with this idea for a lot longer.

NV: Oh, sure. So we started The Great Gatsby when I was a sophomore in high school and the day we started and nearly got run over in the parking lot. That is way less of a remarkable incident. I was a really spacey kid, but you know, near death experiences will kind of stick with you. And I remember even sitting in class when I was a sophomore thinking, when does the copyright ran out on this? Not long after this book was announced someone on Twitter said something like, so how long has Ms. Vo been sitting on that. And I’m like, Why haven’t you guys come on. I’m like the only one doing this this year. The story has lived in my head for a long time. I mean, my parents came to this country just a few years before I was born. And the American Dream is a big deal for us, for a number of reasons It very much is and the more we look at it, and the more we turn it over, the more we realize I think we’ve been sold a bill of goods basically.

B&N: You know, I think the American Dream is something that so many of us wrestle with. And you know, I suppose you could argue that Gatsby is the most American novel, ever, as it were.

NV: It’s a novel about fakes. It’s a novel about money. It’s a novel about dying for a dream that never wanted in the first place.

B&N: And class. Class too, because class and money are not always the same. No, absolutely not. So here you are. And you’ve actually sort of taken it out of the male gaze. It’s Gatsby, and Nick are very present in the book. But this book is really about Jordan, and to a certain extent, her relationship with Daisy. And less, even though she’s having a thing with Nick. Even though they’re having fun. I think they’re having a lot of fun. Yeah. Yeah, it’s really about the women which subverts quite a lot was doing in Gatsby.

NV: When I was writing the book, it came to me the if you ask Jay Gatsby who this book was about, without a moment of doubt, he would say it was Daisy and he would be lying to himself and to us. He believes it’s about DAISY, he believes that it’s about this grand love that, you know, he has for this girl, but he met once in a parlor before the war. And he’d be wrong, he’d be very wrong. And part of it is the fact that that would still be him telling us it would still be Jay Gatsby telling us what the story was about. And then when you step back, and you’re trying to look at these women who are having their stories being told, and then even you look at the pieces that you’re given from the male characters, like one of the biggest moments that comes to mind is the fact that in The Great Gatsby, Daisy very briefly mentions the Twilight sleep. And that was a part that got to me, because you know, I read as a teenager, and we gloss right over, I had no idea what the Twilight sleep was. And then I looked it up. So basically what we have is a form of painless birth, someone would go into labor, they would be put under using, among other things, and they would wake up after a painless sleep with a beautiful baby in their arms. And this sounds amazing. It sounds incredible to a generation of women who have been very much part of the birth giving process for their mothers, their older sisters, their aunts. And the thing about this Twilight sleep is that although the person is knocked out for it, they are still feeling all of the pain and their body remembers and there are these nightmare scenarios of the fact that these bodies are still going through pain. So they’re blindfolded. They’re tied down as they give birth, and they do wake up and they do have a beautiful baby in their arms and then the dreams start and then the memories start. There are these people who wake up and they don’t know why they’re having this trauma, these flashbacks, until it comes out more clearly what the Twilight sleep actually was and what it does both physiologically and physically. And Daisy is in her early 20s. While Daisy is dangerous, and Daisy is culpable for a lot in the book, she is in her early 20s. And like I said before, I remember being in my early 20s was like that is a horrifying thing to go through at any age, especially when you’re that young and that vulnerable.

B&N: Jordan’s actually more comfortable with the Daisys and the Toms and the Nicks and the Gatsby’s than she is she even comes out and says, I don’t know what to do with myself in Chinatown. No, I don’t stand out. I don’t know what to do with myself. And she wouldn’t be the first Asian American to feel that way. But you’ve also upped the stakes a bit too, because there’s this thing called the Manchester act.
NV: Yes. So there’s no real Manchester act, it was based on the various Chinese exclusion acts that were coming out during the day. And it’s very much, I mean, there’s a number of reasons it’s there. But one of the big ones is because I needed something for Jordan to look at that a lot of her white peers do not give a damn about it is a point of polite conversation for them. It’s an academic issue. And even for Jordan as her very well meaning Aunt says, you know, my dear, you are rich, and that buys her exception, but she doesn’t know how much at this point. And there’s that unease that once again, Jordan just has to navigate and live in. And Jordan, I think she puts it at one point, there’s nothing as uninteresting as something I can’t have. If she can’t have acceptance, she’ll be uninterested in it. And if people don’t love her, then she doesn’t care. And that’s one way to navigate. And it can be a very lonely way to navigate. But it’s a coping mechanism, and all they do is they help you cope, they do not help you do it healthily or happily, but you will cope.

B&N: But that’s a big piece of Gatsby itself. The original Fitzgerald novel, too, is every single one of those characters is so lonely that they don’t even know what to do with themselves. So Jordan is just keeping with her crowd. It’s fashionable, she does have this very cool skill that you’ve handed off to her though she has her own form of magic. And it is based in an actual Vietnamese art. And I want to talk to you about it for a second because it’s very cool. And there are other Asian communities that also have it. But it’s the art of paper cutting, and Jordan can cut paper and bring things to life. She’s not particularly good. And there’s a character who shows up later who’s like my sister, and I can teach you how to do this, right. Because you’re just messy. Yeah, it’s ugly. It’s bad, like you don’t know what you’re doing. But Jordan can cut shapes. And the first time we see her as a child, she’s doing it and she brings a tiger to life. And then she does something with Daisy and we are going to try and keep a little spoiler free. There’s something that happens with Daisy later where Jordan is able to use her paper cutting skills. But did you know from the start that was going to be a piece of this book?

NV: Yes, I did. Because in The Great Gatsby, there was a line on page two that kind of plays into the idea of paper sacrifices. And I’m like, Oh, that’s right there. Thank you. Part of it is just the fact that the more I looked into it, the more that the whole paper cutting tradition from Vietnam, in specific, and Asia in general, there’s so much there. And it is so very region specific. And it’s such a beautiful art. And part of it is for me, the fact that it’s historically been an art that was begun inside the home with you know, with women with people who were working within the home, and it was done with scraps. This isn’t like some sort of beautiful art that you get sponsorship before from the government or the someone trots out into the town square. This is something you do at night in your off minutes simply because you can make something beautiful and something lovely from what you have leftover. The artist is called paper cutting but it started out with it possibly predates paper, which I thought was super cool because it starts out with like leaves or bit of bits of leather or even with very light arc. And it’s also very difficult. I tried to do some of it in preparation for this. And I quickly realized, oh I’m bad at this.

B&N: I can do snowflakes.

NV: I can’t even do snowflakes, well, that’s a lot of bits of paper I have on my desk now.

B&N: Yeah, I didn’t say the snowflakes are cute, but I can do I mean, if you need to entertain a small child.

NV: Most small kids actually are much less paper cutting than I am. So I’ll let them have that. I mean, I wrote a book. They’re like for whatever they got.

B&N: Well, and speaking of writing books, though, so your career really starts just as the pandemic is starting in 2020. You also are the author of a series right now it’s about to become a three book series. But right now that first few volumes are out. It’s the Singing Hills Cycle. And it’s based on Chinese folklore. But you came out of the slush pile?

NV: Oh, yeah. Okay, so I think I need to give you a timeline on this because it’s super weird. I wrote my first novel, which is actually Siren Queen, coming out in a little while. I wrote it in 2017. And it got rejected. And I’m like, oh, that’s fine. And then I’m like, Okay, well, I can just send it off submission. It’ll be great. So I sent it on submission. And then tor.com came out with their call for novellas and literally I saw the call for submissions for the novellas. I said oh, 20,000 words. I can write 20,000 words. And so I wrote The Empress of Salt and Fortune in about a month or so in all fairness, I had the shape of the book for quite some time before that I sent it in and life be what is I just didn’t think about it more because I had a lot of other things going on. So during my time I’m submitting Siren Queen to various agents and seeing if anyone was very interested in it. And basically, within one week, I got two letters of interest from agents. And at the end of that week, I got this email from Rishi Ten at Tor, and the emails just started out with, you know, it was it was a wonderful email. It was complimentary. It was kind and I was reading along thinking, oh, man, this is a sweet rejection, she must be so cool. And it turns out she wanted it, which blew my mind. So you know, basically, in the span of two weeks, I sold my first novella that got fished out of the slush pile, and I got my agent Diana Fox, so that was a very busy 2018 for me.

B&N: So Empress of Salt and Fortune is the first volume of The Singing Hills Cycle. You won the Hugo Award for debut novella, which is a very, very cool moment.

NV: It was a very odd moment, because now the expectations are very strange. And every time something weird happens, I’m like, is it because I didn’t get nominated for Hugo this year? Is that why? But apparently, I was told no, that’s not why.

B&N: Okay, so you have written three novellas, Siren Queen, which is coming in May 22. And we’re going to talk about that in a little bit. Your first novel, which is now about to be published, so Chosen and the Beautiful. Are you writing your novellas as you’re writing The Chosen and the Beautiful? Or do you put them aside for a second while you’re writing a standalone like Chosen?

NV: I think in an ideal world, I would actually just work on one thing at once. But no, they’re they’re kind of all just worked on concurrently. And hopefully they stay in their boxes. And I don’t suddenly have poor chi and almost brilliant wandering into a 1920s party for which they’re dramatically ill equipped.

B&N: Well, and your novellas, they are absolutely traditional novellas, roughly 130 pages, which you know, longer than a story, you know, novellas are actually very pleasing art form.

NV: I love them. And if you’ve noticed every single novella I’ve written so far, has been just barely up to word count to the point when I think at one point, Rishi asked me, during what we were doing some of the final layout work for Empress of Salt and Fortune. And she said, we’re just barely close enough to be able to bind this. And I’m like, I’m so sorry. So no, it’s like the fewer words like unfinished story with I will absolutely take that.

B&N: I think there are some, I understand why you love novellas, but I think there might be some listeners out there in the world who are wondering, why not just write a novel. I mean, you’ve got these three tiny 128-130 page novellas, what do you get from writing novellas, as the creative that you don’t get from writing a novel?

NV: Being done faster? No, it sounds so terrible. But it really is my attention span is like this. It’s not the size of like a juvenile cockroach. So for me, it’s like the sooner I can be done with it. Because the fun of a novel is you know, starting and getting to know everything and the minute you know, anything, which is about generously but 75% of the way through it, you’re done. And the last 25% is usually when I’m like, Okay, I need to fake my own death, change my name, run away to northern Wisconsin and live in a haunted house full peacocks. And then it’s time to get off Zillow and go back to work.

B&N: Okay, you know peacocks are really noisy, right?

NV: Oh, yeah. No, it’s terrible. No, they’re painfully noisy. But they’ll keep the townspeople away from my property.

B&N: Okay, as long as you know. There are people who do not know how noisy they are.

NV: I met some very sweet ones. But yeah, they’re the screaming comes with it. It’s part of my mystique. Now. It’s part of my brand.

B&N: Okay, so two novels, three novellas. And is there a forthcoming in the Singing Hills Cycle? Did I read that right?

NV: Yeah, basically, I’m going to keep writing the Singing Hills novellas until they make me stop. Basically, there’s actually one that is not getting published yet. I’ve written it. It’s dark enough. And I’m probably not supposed to give any spoilers for it. But it’s dark enough when they read it. My agents, Diana and Rishi, I think they did the equivalent of looking at me and said, Nghi, are you sure this is what the world needs right now? And like? Probably not. So that’s just sitting in drydock until someone wants it. So hopefully someone does some time.

B&N: I’m sure they’ll figure it out. But yeah, I don’t know when your agent and your editor are both saying hmm.

NV: They’re both so much smarter than me. And it is so important to have them say things to me, like, Nghi, was was all of this cannibalism really necessary? I’m like, emotionally for me. Yeah. Yeah, it was.

B&N: Well, it’s also true to the story in certain cases. But again, we’re just going to tease all of this terrible stuff. I do want to ask about your creative process. Because here you are, you know, we’ve mentioned your agent a couple of times, we’ve mentioned your editor a couple of times, you’d like to be done fast, I get that you like brevity. But you also really love story. And you really love character. And that is so clearly brought across in The Chosen and the Beautiful. So can we talk about your process for a second? I mean, you’ve got to have some method to jumpstart everything. But then what does it look like when you’re talking to your agent? What does it look like when you’re talking to your editor? Like how are you working in notes from them?

NV: I’ve spent most of my career alone actually, I’ve been a writer for about 15 years or so right now. So you know, as a freelance writer, I’ve been a ghost writer, most of that time period has been spent doing things like writing cockroach care guides and how to deal with abscesses and alpacas, it’s gross. So I’ve mostly been on my own. And mostly my whole process before that was put words on paper, send it off, and then their money appears in my bank account. That is my favorite part of the writing process. And so suddenly, I signed on with Diana Fox. And, you know, so I’m not used to the editing process at all. And she’s like, Okay, this all needs to be fixed. And I have to fight down. The first impulse, is basically this tiny diva lives in my head going, how dare you. So we have to fight that. But first we fight that impulse. And we also let go over the dream that I will turn in the work. And Diana and Rachel’s like, oh, no, this is fantastic. Isn’t the right to print? No, no, it never can. So first, it’s also finding the diva that lives in my head, that’s important to do. A lot of it is being alone, I’m very good at being alone. So part of it is letting other people in. And part of it is just, you know, button chair and words on the page. I have always known that. At the end of the day, the only thing that matters is words on the page, as long as the words are there, they can be fixed. They don’t need to be good, but they can be fixed. And that is the entire possibility that my whole career is based off of no matter what I do, I have to understand that I can fix it.

B&N: How did you get started as a ghost rider? I didn’t realize that was part of your story.

NV: Oh, basically just a sort of a chain of really, really badly paid jobs followed by less badly paid jobs, followed by people who pass me on to other clients. And finally ending with Diana, who said you are being exploited, loudly in my ear at 2AM, because that’s when Diane and I talk. So she is very happy to see me done with that portion of my career and looking at the money. So am I. So let’s see, it was client work. It’s once again, it’s words on the page, and people will tell me it’ll pay for it. And if not, then you know, do it again, or don’t promise client.

B&N: Luckily for us, you’re reading fiction. But what would you say to someone who’s starting out and has heard all the stories about the slush pile and finding an agent, doing the work and button chair and all of these things? What would you say because your career has had a really interesting arc.

NV: Weird, and I don’t know if I can, it’s like, okay, first off, I have to say, I can’t recommend this path. This path relied on me basically not sleeping for like about 15 years, I think and balancing three or four jobs at once. And my big stroke of luck was 15 years ago, lucking into a third shift tech support position, I got to sit on the phone, and I’m like, Oh, I can just write while I’m waiting for calls to come in. So that’s where I got started. And then from there, I just moved to an entirely freelance existence, which is a very kind of semi Mon, Twilight sort of job to live in. You know, it’s like, I still have to stop myself from saying that I’m unemployed these days. Because I’m not. I have like an agent and money that comes in. So I’m not actually an employee, it just feels like it all the time. But what advice I would give to other people? Do more networking than I did, definitely, definitely talk to other people and the people who are writing around you, they’re not your competition. They’re your colleagues and the people who are writing at your level at the publications where you are also hoping to get published, they are going to be your best allies, they really are. They’re going to fight for you. And they’re going to tell you what not to do and what to do. They’re the best people to have around you. If I had more people like that around me, I would have learned that my pitches are kind of terrible, which once again, Diana had to tell me, it was kind of funny. So I was submitting to agents. I was getting some nibbles. I was getting some full manuscript requests, which is great. And then Diana said something along was like, oh, yeah, your pitch was awful. And like, Oh, my God, she’s like, No, it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter. Because she also asked for the first pages, and she loved the first pages. And that’s what you need. But apparently, in my own head, I feel like when I’m pitching a novel, it’s sort of like trying to ride a cow. You can, but no one is very happy about it. And neither of you are very good at it. So that’s where I am with pitches, get better at pitches than I am. How about that?

B&N: Well, and here’s the thing, some of your peers have blurbed your book? Yeah, we’re talking R. F. Kuang, and Alix E. Harrow and Erica Swyler, who are all writers that were quite fond of at B&N certainly, and it was really great. Just, I mean, wow, those are some fun names to see.

NV: It was incredible. And I remember the conversation where the names came up, actually, because you know, before books come out, you know, your agent and your editor get on the phone together, and they’re like, Okay, who do we know that we can ask to blurb this, which is, you know, it’s kind of a big deal. And Diana and Rishi are just sitting there. And we’re on this three way call, and there’s there there’s pitching these names that I’ve read before, you know, and then they turned to me and they’re like, Nghi, do you know anyone? And I’m like, Guys, I go to no parties. I live in Milwaukee. I know no one. So that’s been kind of stunning. And it’s still a little bit more than whenever anyone tells me I’ve read my book. I’m like, how? How’d you find it? And they found it because Tor.dotcom’s marketing team is fantastic. But it’s still it’s still a bit of a shock for me even two years on.

B&N: It’s still really exciting though, especially as a bookseller to see how many women are writing fantasy and science fiction and just looking for the stories that are interesting to them. And I mean, Alix Harrow’s Once and Future Witches. Bestiary by K-Ming Chang and R. F. Kuang’s The Poppy War series, she has a new novel coming in August called Babel that I cannot wait to get my hands on. And certainly Erica Swyler, who is working on something new. That’s all I know, she’s working on something new. I have to be patient, but it’s really great to see women taking their seats, you know, because for long time there was this perception that it was really kind of a dude thing to do. And it’s like, well, actually.

NV: And anything we do, is a niche, right? It’s like, if it’s queer, if you’re a woman, if you’re not white, it’s like you’re a niche. And you’re, you’re special interest. And of course people can’t roll with that. Of course they can.

B&N: But I think the fun too. And what you do with these characters, what you do with Jordan, what you do with Nick and Gatsby and Daisy, who I still don’t have a lot of patience for Daisy. And that’s a long seated dislike and Tom, I mean, but what you do with these characters in your world, and your world really is a seamless blend of you know, I mentioned this at the top of the show, Fitzgerald’s original narrative. But then you’ve taken these pieces and worked them in and it’s it’s magic, it’s fantasy. It’s a lot of sex. I will say, a lot of sex. It’s a very short book, but there’s a lot ofsex. And your characters are who they are. And they’re kind of great. But while they’re messy, yeah, way that people are messing. But how much extra research did you do while you were building your work? Because obviously, you’ve given yourself the constraint of keeping to the Gatsby kind of orbit. But you know, people dive into his pool, and then they turn into Koi. Just great detail Come on. That’s a great detail.

NV: It’s so much fun to write. The party scenes are so much fun to write.

B&N: So we know that party scenes are what they are. But Gatsby has a moment where you’re talking about how his household staff is always visible because he’s trying to make a point or you’re talking about clothing, other things like that, giving birth, you know, the bit with Daisy and the Twilight sleep and things like that. So how much research did you need to do?

NV: Okay, so the part of the process was I went through and I reread The Great Gatsby, of course, every time I ran into something that I absolutely did not understand or even thought I didn’t understand, I went and looked it up, I got a lot of mileage out of that. Whenever song was mentioned, I went and looked into the whole Texan song, if I tried to, if I could, I would try to listen to it. And a lot of the songs actually have to do with the poor boys and rich girls, actually, which I didn’t realize when I first read the book, and I start reading about the 1920s, which is basically in a lot of ways the birth of modern advertising, it was very much a world where we were just beginning to get advertising and what it could look like and what it could promise us. And right now, you know, advertising is this terrible thing that we deal with when we’re trying to get our poor social media or when we’re trying to watch our TV, we don’t like it. And we’re very suspicious of it. But back then it was the first time anyone had offered a lot of these people, everything. And that’s what advertising has always done, it has offered us a better world a better us and we had no defense against it in the 1920s. It was brand new, of course, we believe what the nice newspaper tells us. And so part of it is my understanding of magic that I created for The Chosen and the Beautiful, which is magic offers us everything. And it’s not true. It never has been true. But we’re so open to it. And the parallel to that was my research into electricity, which comes out a little bit in the novel. But I never get into as far as I want to the idea that electricity is magic, light whenever you want it, with a flick of a switch. Suddenly, there’s power and there’s light and everyone can have it, cities have it. But if you live in the rural areas of United States, you’re still living in the dark, you’re still you’re still on candles, you’re still on lanterns and that difference. And once again, it boils down to power. And that’s all of it. That’s advertising. Advertising promises you power, electricity gives it to you. And magic does both.

B&N: And magic shows up in your new novel that’s landing in May.

NV: That’s Siren Queen, and it is my first novel and I am I’m so excited. It is Hollywood that has run off Fairyland rules set in the 1930s. And at the very center of it is my first real main character, Luli Wei, and she’s a Chinese American actress, and you don’t even want to know what she’s wanting to do to win.

B&N: I’m gonna find out when I read the book. Okay, but she’s the first character you created. So when did you know you had her voice? I’m assuming that’s how Siren Queen started is that you locked onto her voice and said, Oh, I think I have to write this book. Or did you start with the idea and think, Oh, am I gonna tell them?

NV: This is one of those things where I love chatting with my friends online because I have a perfect snapshot of when Siren Queen started. And it was literally me late at night talking to one of my friends saying, Hey, have you ever noticed that 1930s Hollywood is a lot like fairyland. They take your birth name, they give you a new one. Sometimes they give you a new face and the promises of eternal beauty and youth but it’s all but you have to play terrible games to get it and my friends didn’t tell me to shut up because I was going on about that for like, a few hours. And after a few hours. I’m like, Huh? Who’s watching all of this? Who was watching me build this world? And I’m like, Oh, Hi Luli. It’s nice to see you here. Did it take you long are you are you having a good day? And that was Luli, and I knew who Luli was right away. And she hasn’t changed much actually, which is a miracle given the fact that when we started editing it, Diana said something like she’s like, you know, this is three novellas in a trench coat. Right. And I’m like you can tell? And she says yes, we can all tell. Yeah, that was deeply humbling.

B&N: Okay, but you turn those three novellas in a trench coat into a novel.

NV: With a great deal of help. Yes.

B&N: Do you have a favorite moment from that editing process for Siren Queen?

NV: Yes, it’s a bit of a sad one. And it’s very much a picture of the editing. There was this fight in the book. It wasn’t a fight I had with anyone else. But it was a fight and just wasn’t landing. It just wasn’t landing and wasn’t landing and think. And I said something like, I want you to take a couple of runs out and come back. I’m like, okay, so I wrote five versions of that fight at the end of the day, and it was a big one. And it was fine. Actually, one of the versions I think, had like mecca idol in it, because I was so tired. Nailing that fight, and I’m actually still really proud of that scene. It was the win.

B&N: Do you have a favorite moment from The Chosen and the Beautiful part of the writing of it?

NV: Yeah, I think so. Because, hey, final scene between Nick and Jordan, which is, it’s a big deal. It’s a big deal. For the novel. It’s a big deal. It was a big deal for me. I wrote it during my sister’s wedding in Las Vegas. And it was at a diner inside the hotel, which was inside a casino I was staying at, and it was about 3am. I was like, Okay, I’m just gonna go down to the diner and just get this. So went down, I was writing it. And I realized, like, huh, I could gamble at my booth. I didn’t realize I could gamble in my booth at the diner. I finished that scene with that realization. And I’m like, and it was like, oh, cool, I may already be a winner. That was the moment.

B&N: And honestly, that scene is so great. And the emotional payoff is really significant. I’m not going to say anything more.

NV: That was so much fun to write. Got to sleep after that. That was fantastic.

B&N: It was really fun to read. So Chosen and th eBeautiful lands and paperback, the beginning of April, we have Siren Queen coming May 10. And then October 25, you have Into the Riverlands, the third volume of theSinging Hills Cycle, which will go until it doesn’t, which I’m very excited about for you. But what’s next, what are you working on now? Because there’s no way these books are just coming out and you don’t have something that you’re working on.

NV: I’m trying to figure out what I’m allowed to speak about and what not yet, it let’s see, some point will be a novella sequel to Chosen and the Beautiful, which is called we’ll see. There is third novel that is basically in the same world as Siren Queen and The Chosen and the Beautiful, sort of underground project that I’m working on, because no one wants it and no one has bought it. So it’s always a bit risky. It sort of offic about 11,000 words into which I’m like, I don’t know who loves you, but I do. And that’s all that’s all that short story has. So there’s that going on. And you know, it’s gonna be whatever, whatever grabs my attention next, I suppose whatever anyone will buy about that. I’m available. I’m so available.

B&N: And all sounds perfectly fair. There’s a bunch of stuff that you and I could talk about. But it’s all spoilers. All spoilers, we’re leaving those out. That’s not helpful.

NV: Here’s the thing. One of the big things I’ve realized during this whole writing process is not alone. And it’s sort of like it’s both this wonderfully cathartic. Oh my god, I’m not alone. There are people like me everywhere. And also, you know, you’re not alone in the house, right? I’d have moments as well. There are so many people who are rooting for this both in terms of booksellers like yourself, and everyone in Barnes and Noble and everyone who has been so kind to me at tor.com. Everyone at Fox literary, it’s a little intimidating. And it’s always reading this book, in 1960 there’s the first manned expedition into the Challenger beat, which is the deepest point in the Mariana Trench. And talking about casting light seafloor, there’s this black fish that looks a little bit like a soul that’s on the bottom of the sea floor has no eyes, just sitting on the sea bottom is flooded with light, it just kind of like they see it kind of laying around a little bit and they’re like, Oh my God, this thing has never seen light before and then just kind of turns around and trundles away. Because what the hell else? Is it going to do feel very much like that fish. I’m like, Well, this is brand new. What’s up here? You know, and so that’s mostly what it’s felt like, and I don’t know if other young writers need awareness of what it’s like, but it’s a lot like that.

B&N: Okay, that is really funny.

NV: No, it’s like, a little soul, just kind of like trundles away. Like I have no use for this. I’m like, oh, okay, little guy.

B&N: Well, don’t give up on us completely. We like reading you. One thing I sort of want to bring up before I let you go. It’s really wonderful to see Jordan as a Vietnamese American, and to have her moment, especially when we’re living through this very strange moment that we’re living through right now in America. And if people can create their own fictional versions of the Manchester act, I think there are some folks who would do that in a heartbeat and are trying and some are succeeding. What was it like for you seeing her come to I mean, representation matters. What was it like for you watching her come to life on the page?

NV: I loved her so much, and I was so afraid for her. It’s facetious and extreme to say that every piece of writing has a little soul in it in the fact that you already know that I have written things like clockwork farming manuals. It’s there and Jordon is not me, Jordan has most my memories of plenty and how amazing and exhilarating and exhausting that was and how much more time I had for things that I don’t bother with these days, you know, but the end of the day, it was incredible. It was an honor. It was a privilege. It was a roller coaster and a bit of a nightmare and a little bit a bit revelatory. And then like wow, I was really um, when I was 19 when I was when I was 20. You know, I was not a smart kid. Also trying to respect that I’m like, Okay, I wasn’t smart but I also see why I wasn’t smart. So we’re gonna give that room to breathe. The fact that so many ways I felt I was trusting people with born in a way that I don’t really trust people. I had to and I think that is paid off. That is I think that has paid off for me. I think this paid off for people who have written to me about her which is deeply humbling and every time is a shock and a pleasure. Scary and wonderful. How about that?

B&N: Scary wonderful sounds like why we read. Well I’m really looking forward to people meeting your Jordan and your Nick and your Gatsby and your Daisy and yeah Tom is still there, and whatever. Did I just show my bias, I think I did. Nghi Vo, thank you so much for joining us on Poured Over. The chosen and the Beautiful is out in paperback now and it is our speculative fiction pick for April 2022