Old Money, New Gods: Revealing The Chosen and the Beautiful by Nghi Vo

The Great Gatsby reimagined with a queer Jordan Baker at its center? Yes please! We’re thrilled to share the cover for Nghi Vo’s The Chosen and the Beautiful, a debut novel that reinvents the American classic. The Chosen and the Beautiful will be available in hardcover and ebook from Tordotcom Publishing on June 1, 2021.

“Gatsby the way it should have been written—dark, dazzling, fantastical.”—R. F. Kuang

Immigrant.
Socialite.
Magician.

Jordan Baker grows up in the most rarefied circles of 1920s American society—she has money, education, a killer golf handicap, and invitations to some of the most exclusive parties of the Jazz Age. She’s also queer, Asian, adopted, and treated as an exotic attraction by her peers, while the most important doors remain closed to her.

But the world is full of wonders: infernal pacts and dazzling illusions, lost ghosts and elemental mysteries. In all paper is fire, and Jordan can burn the cut paper heart out of a man. She just has to learn how.

Nghi Vo’s debut novel 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.

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The Chosen and the Beautiful

Art by Greg Ruth
Design by Christine Foltzer

Nghi Vo was born in central Illinois, and she retains a healthy respect for and love of corn mazes, scarecrows, and fifty-year floods. These days, she lives on the shores of Lake Michigan, which is less a lake than an inland sea that she is sure is just biding its time. Her short fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons, Uncanny Magazine, Lightspeed, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, PodCastle, and Fireside, and her short story “Neither Witch nor Fairy” made the 2014 Otherwise (formerly Tiptree) Award Honor List. Nghi mostly writes about food, death, and family, but sometimes detours into blood, love, and rhetoric. She believes in the ritual of lipstick, the power of stories, and the right to change your mind.

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If you can’t wait for June, check out Nghi Vo’s novellas in The Singing Hills Cycle, The Empress of Salt and Fortune and When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain.