This novel’s wry wit and eerie eroticism are surely not for every mortal, but from the old bones of an American classic, Vo has conjured up something magically alive. Even the smallest enchanted details are tinged with infernal infection. Read more Print length 288 pages Language English Publication date MaDimensions 5.3 x 0.82 x 8. By inflating the story’s most fantastical implications, The Chosen and the Beautiful offers a timely consideration of class exploitation, sexual aggression and racial privilege. Nghi Vo’s debut novel, The Chosen and the Beautiful, reinvents this classic of the American canon as a coming-of-age story full of magic, mystery, and glittering excess, and introduces a major new literary voice. It may sound counterintuitive, but Vo’s introduction of witchcraft, necromancy and enchantment miraculously produces a more relevant novel than that poetic tale of a gaudy stalker and his closeted pimp that’s been passed off for decades as the ultimate interrogation of the American Dream. Vo’s audacious amendments shift the register of The Great Gatsby, creating a story that galvanizes Fitzgerald’s classic and leaves a new one vibrating alongside. But The Chosen and the Beautiful is much closer to Joyce Carol Oates’s 2013 novel, The Accursed, her fiend-infused history of Princeton University. sounds like some monstrous act of literary desecration like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies doing the Charleston.

Not only does Vo capture the timbre of Fitzgerald’s lush prose, but she follows the trajectory of the novel’s contrails into another realm.

Vo’s adaptation of The Great Gatsby is completely ridiculous, and I love it with the passion of a thousand burning hearts.

The chosen and the beautiful nghi vo