SEPTEMBER 2022 - AudioFile
With its stellar ensemble of narrators, this surreal short story collection creates an immersive listening experience. The narrators rotate with each story, making each one shine. The works feature a chorus of dead cousins, a woman who is trying to survive a catastrophic flood, and the delight of two girls who are falling in love. The stories revel in the unexpected, delightfully surprising listeners at every turn. The narrators are excellent, with Nancy Wu, Natalie Naudus, and Catherine Ho seamlessly moving back and forth between characters of all ages, keeping pace with each story’s mood. Elaine Wang and Annie Q shine, in particular, perfectly capturing the angst of youth, the quick snap of a teenager’s retort. Together, all the narrators are the perfect cast for this audiobook. K.D.W. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine
Publishers Weekly
★ 05/23/2022
Chang (Bestiary) returns with a dazzling collection of stories within stories that draw on old myths to embody the heartache and memories of Asian American women. In “The Chorus of Dead Cousins,” the unnamed narrator is constantly disrupted by the ghosts of her dead cousins and tries to escape them by traveling with her storm-chaser wife to record a tornado. In “Episodes of Hoarders,” a woman nicknamed “little crab” grieves over her dead hoarder grandmother. A wild mother-in-law repeatedly pretends to die and makes married life a living nightmare for the protagonist of “Xífù,” who envies her lesbian daughter for being unattached to men. In “Anchor,” a young woman struggles with the verbal abuse of her aunt, who raised her after her mother died during childbirth. She’s also haunted by the ghost of a girl her aunt accidentally shot many years earlier, has delicate conversations with a nun at a nearby temple, and searches for the old toy gun her brother lost before he left for the military. Chang’s bold conceits and potent imagery evoke a raw, visceral power that captures feelings of deep longing and puts them into words. This stellar collection will leave readers hungry for more. Agent: Julia Kardon, HG Literary. (July)
From the Publisher
[K-Ming Chang] rewrites the world as a place of radical transformation.’”—The New York Times Book Review
“[Her] ability, to take a common, decidedly earthbound, experience and transform it through her lens into a fantastical, otherworldly encounter shines. . . . Chang’s writing reflects her gift as a lifelong listener of oral storytelling . . . and her ability to synthesize new ideas with her own spin on language.”—San Francisco Chronicle
“Chang has a special talent for forging history into myth and myth into present-day fiction. . . . Gods of Want is in some ways a fantasy of queer freedom. Its main characters, all Taiwanese or Chinese by birth or descent, are allowed to be who they are, to love and make love to whomever they choose.”—Los Angeles Times
“[K-Ming Chang] is back with her signature precise and enthralling prose in this short-story collection.”—Shondaland
“K-Ming Chang’s inspired mix of magic and realism returns in full fabulist force. . . . The stories are eclectic . . . and united by Chang’s fascination with the queer and quotidian in her characters’ worlds. . . . Piercing.”—Esquire
“Her new short-story collection Gods of Want both widens and calcifies the expansiveness of her range. . . . Chang is singular amongst us all. . . . New work from Chang is a cause for celebration—a holiday in its own right—and it’s also a reminder of the infinite possibilities on the page. . . . Nothing short of marvelous.”—Bryan Washington, for Electric Literature
“A whole body experience.”—THEM
“These stories glitter and pulse . . . Full of mythic desire, joy and pain disguised as the other, and navigating the precarious balance of how to belong to a land while still belonging to oneself, Gods of Want is bursting with language and images so striking, so sure of their own strength, I found myself stunned. The worlds and characters depicted in these pages are original, strange, sometimes-horrific, and all the more gorgeous because of it.”—Dantiel W. Moniz, author of Milk Blood Heat
“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
“This book traces a line from old worlds to new worlds by means of the bloody umbilical cords that stretch between them. . . . These stories unthread the tangled relationships between mothers and daughter, aunts and cousins, siblings and lovers . . . a lingering sense that language, as well as life, is infinitely adaptable, no matter the ground on which it is given to grow. Lurid, funny, strange, and deftly sorrowing—an important new voice.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Dazzling . . . This stellar collection will leave readers hungry for more.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
SEPTEMBER 2022 - AudioFile
With its stellar ensemble of narrators, this surreal short story collection creates an immersive listening experience. The narrators rotate with each story, making each one shine. The works feature a chorus of dead cousins, a woman who is trying to survive a catastrophic flood, and the delight of two girls who are falling in love. The stories revel in the unexpected, delightfully surprising listeners at every turn. The narrators are excellent, with Nancy Wu, Natalie Naudus, and Catherine Ho seamlessly moving back and forth between characters of all ages, keeping pace with each story’s mood. Elaine Wang and Annie Q shine, in particular, perfectly capturing the angst of youth, the quick snap of a teenager’s retort. Together, all the narrators are the perfect cast for this audiobook. K.D.W. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2022-04-27
Composed of 16 short stories that explore the immigrant experience, this book traces a line from old worlds to new worlds by means of the bloody umbilical cords that stretch between them.
Chang returns to the thematic territory of her debut novel, Bestiary (2020), in these stories that unthread the tangled relationships between mothers and daughter, aunts and cousins, siblings and lovers in the broadly defined Taiwanese immigrant community now living in California. The stories progress through their antic, sometimes manic, often bloody, muddy, orgasmic, or chewed-up and spit-out paces. In “The Chorus of Dead Cousins,” an endlessly proliferating infestation of dead cousins threatens to drive away the speaker’s new wife with their poltergeist mischief, including farting in the minister’s face at the wedding and replacing all of the wife’s teeth with the red-dyed shells of melon seeds in the night. In “Nüwa,” named for the mother goddess of Chinese mythology who is often depicted as having a long, serpentine body, the train that passes the narrator and her sister Meimei’s house at night may also be a snake who is responsible for devouring all the girls that have gone missing in their neighborhood. In “Resident Aliens,” the speaker, her mother, and her seven aunts “share two bedrooms and rent out the basement—what had once been a slaughterhouse, with hooks that snagged on our shadows and no windows but our mouths,” to a series of 26 widows, each upping the fairy-tale ante on the one who came before. Separated into three sections—“Mothers,” “Myths,” and “Moths,”—the book signals its lingual play from the table of contents on. Indeed, the ease with which the various narrators shift into poetic transcendence in their workaday descriptions coupled with the linguistic flexibility of non-native idioms repurposed for a new English in a new world is as much a part of the storytelling as the stories themselves. All this together leaves the reader with a lingering sense that language, as well as life, is infinitely adaptable, no matter the ground on which it is given to grow.
Lurid, funny, strange, and deftly sorrowing—an important new voice.