Gods of Want: A New York Times Notable Book of 2022

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Description

Surreal and seductive collection of stories by Taiwanese American writer and poet K-Ming Chang. Themes of body, memory, queerness and family explored with boundless, dark imagination. Surreal and seductive - brimming with moths, myths and mothers, nine-headed birds, ghost cousins and storm-chasers - Gods of Want is a startling first collection of short stories from a rising talent. In 'Auntland', a stream of aunts adjust to American life by sneaking kisses from women at temple and buying tubs of vanilla ice cream to prep for citizenship tests. In 'The Chorus of Dead Cousins', ghost cousins cross space, seas and skies to haunt their living cousin. In 'Xif ', a mother-in-law tortures a wife in increasingly unsuccessful attempts to oust her. In 'Mariela', two girls explore each other's bodies for the first time in the belly of a plastic shark. And in 'Resident Aliens', a series of mysterious widows, each harbouring a calamitous secret, make their home in a former slaughterhouse. K-Ming Chang's storytelling is fierce, fabulist and feminist. In these uncanny tales, she delves into myth and memory, corporeality and ghostliness, queerness and the quotidian, with boundless imagination.

Reviews

Alert to the ways reality can buckle and contort, Chang conjures fiction that is almost fairytale-like, mythical, unsettling - yet at the same time blisteringly alive and unapologetically queer * Guardian *
These stories glitter and pulse -- DANTIEL W. MONIZ, author of Milk Blood Heat
A voracious, probing collection, proof of how exhilarating the short story can be... Each one is possessed of a powerful hunger, a drive to metabolize the recognizable features of a familiar world and transform them into something wilder, and achingly alive -- Alexandra Kleeman * New York Times Book Review *
Constantly illuminating and thoroughly astounding... a stunning and moving work by one of our most brilliant authors. -- BRYAN WASHINGTON, author of Lot and Memorial
These stories by the Taiwanese American author of the gutsy 2020 debut novel Bestiary are obsessed with the vagaries of emigration and adolescence. Populated by ghosts and spirits, they dissolve the rigidities of American life into a slipstream of folkloric myth and transform the familiar world into something wilder. -- 100 Notable Books of 2022 * New York Times *
To read K-Ming Chang is to see the world in fresh, surreal technicolor... Both wild and lyrical, visionary and touching. Read her! -- SHARLENE TEO, author of Ponti
Ferociously talented -- JUSTIN TORRES, author of We the Animals
A whole body experience. * THEM *
No one writes like K-Ming Chang. Wise, energetic, funny, and wild, Gods of Want displays a boundless imagination anchored by the weight of ancestors and history. These stories sing, a true force to behold. -- KALI FAJARDO-ANSTINE, author of Sabrina and Corina
In the genre of feminine madness, these stories are to be worshipped. They are fearless, hysterical, violent yet full of grace. Each sentence escalates toward devastating, poetic insight about our bodies, about cultural demands both treasured and feared, and about what makes being alive a terror and a joy. -- VENITA BLACKBURN, author of How to Wrestle a Girl

Author Bio

K-Ming Chang is a Kundiman fellow, a Lambda Literary Award finalist and a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree. She is the author of the novel Bestiary, which was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, the PEN/Faulkner Award and the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award.