Don’t Sleep with the Dead
by Nghi Vo

From award-winning author Nghi Vo comes Don’t Sleep with the Dead, a standalone companion novella to The Chosen and the Beautiful, her acclaimed reimagining of The Great Gatsby.

“A vibrant and queer reinvention of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s jazz age classic. . . . I was captivated from the first sentence.”NPR on The Chosen and the Beautiful

Nick Carraway paper soldier and novelist has found a life and a living watching the mad magical spectacle of New York high society in the late thirties. He’s good at watching, and he’s even better at pretending: pretending to be straight, pretending to be human, pretending he’s forgotten the events of that summer in 1922.

On the eve of the second World War, however, Nick learns that someone’s been watching him pretend and that memory goes both ways. When he sees a familiar face at a club one night, it quickly becomes clear that dead or not, damned or not, Jay Gatsby isn’t done with him.

In all paper there is memory, and Nick’s ghost has come home.

Don’t Sleep with the Dead is a haunting, evocative continuation of The Great Gatsby set in the universe of Vo’s celebrated debut, The Chosen and the Beautiful.

From award-winning author Nghi Vo comes Don’t Sleep with the Dead, a standalone companion novella to The Chosen and the Beautiful, her acclaimed reimagining of The Great Gatsby.

• The Great Gatsby reinvented with magic and revolution. It’s fantasy that has startling, brilliant things to say about the American literary canon, and Vo is a voice who deftly and beautifully opens up the fantasy of the American coming-of-age narrative with magic and panache.
• Takes one of the most famous novels in the American canon and infuses it with a velvety 1940s noir; it’s a sultry and queer retelling that stares unblinking at thorny intersecting questions of gender, class, and sexuality, all while soaked in fantastical noir imagery and gorgeous, precise prose. While it’s not a romance, it is absolutely about love–love that maybe eats you and uses you and remakes you into something unrecognizable, but still love.
• Publishing the month of the 100-year-anniversary of The Great Gatsby‘s publication.
• Vo is widely acclaimed, already a Hugo, Ignyte, Shirley Jackson, and William L. Crawford Award winner and World Fantasy Award, Locus, and Lambda Award Finalist. Her Singing Hills novellas, along with their stellar acclaim, have stellar sell-through. The first book continues to have a long and healthy tail, selling over 100 copies a week since it went on sale in 2020, and the first hardcover in series, Into the Riverlands, has generated the most revenue yet less than a year into pub.