Written using prose, images, lists, diagrams, songs, and plays, the novella Funeral follows Eddie from the 1969 film Funeral Parade of Roses in her descent to Hell.  In Hell, Eddie meets and falls in love with Madame Rose during lunch. They spend their days creating Hell's first boba shop and cheering on Hell in the final pingpong match against Heaven, but  their relationship soon falls apart. When Xing returns home to  Shanghai via Hell's bullet train, Eddie sets out on a journey to win  her back, accompanied by her friends Tony Leung, the god Tu'Er  Shen, the moon, Mary Poppins, and her over-talkative Uber  driver, Jimin Park. In this co-authored novella, DAISUKE SHEN & VI KHI NAO explore the depths of morality, pain, and queerness  with irreverent  humor and unflinching honesty.

Press & Media

“Semiotics for the Global Damned” - Review by Conor Hultman, Southwest Review

Named one of “30 Indie Books to Look Out for in Early 2023” -Independent Book Review

B.R. Yeager in Conversation with Daisuke Shen & Vi Khi Nao - The Rumpus

“A Solitude of Two” - RJ Magazine

FUNERAL - short film by Vi Khi Nao [4:16]

“Being Able to Distinguish Isolation from Despair” w/ Vi Khi Nao - De-Canon + Fonograf Ed. Hybrid-Lit Anthology (forthcoming)

Advance Praise

Like two dreams of the underworld playing exquisite corpse with each other. And Tony Leung is in it. 

- SEBASTIAN CASTILLO, author of Not I and Salmon
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 I read this and immediately wanted to riot in the streets, by virtue of how good it was. I also learned a lot of facts about public figures like Awkwafina and Michelle Obama.

-JESI GASTON, director of Black Pill

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This book brings out my ego because I tear up and/or giggle while reading it, feeling like it was written just for me. The film Funeral Parade of Roses—the story that Funeral continues—is an urban retelling, but all the trappings of stylization aren’t there: there’s no enforced grittiness; the lights are very bright, the blood flowing very freshly. This book by Shen and Nao captures the same approach: materials do not shield or dictate shape, they stagger and drape. Sometimes in the movement a secret color flickers. But more than just sensory development, an inexorable sequence of events. More than an allegory or satire or retelling, more like documentation of being entrenched in the universe and all the gossipy deadpan jokes to be made while trying to love sweetly in the face of cruelty’s differentiation. When everything feels impossible, maybe you have mistakenly presumed ethereality. Shen and Nao show that what animates aftermath is without boundaries. 

- GINGER KO, author of Motherlover, Inherit, and Power On

Praise

just finished FUNERAL - good lord. lots of thoughts coursing through me, none of which i'm able to articulate at the moment, aside from that there is an ecstacy/joy to the writing that is so missing from so much contemporary lit. i found myself laughing frequently, but never cheaply, and never as though anything was a joke. it's funny and wild the way life is.

- B.R. YEAGER, author of Burn You the Fuck Alive, Negative Space, Pearl Death, & Amygdalatropolis

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I finished it last night and I LOVE LOVE LOVE it

It’s so weird and so interesting and so good

- text message from JULIET ESCORIA, author of Juliet the Maniac, Witch Hunt, & You Are the Snake

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Oh my God. This is so wild. Which one of us wrote this?

- VI KHI NAO to DAISUKE SHEN in the car while reading one of VI KHI NAO’s sections