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Bestiary
  • Published: 4 February 2021
  • ISBN: 9781473571723
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 272
Categories:

Bestiary

Formats & editions
EBook
4 Feb 2021
Paperback
2 Nov 2021
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Three generations of Taiwanese American women are haunted by the myths of their homeland in this blazing debut of one family's queer desires, violent impulses and buried secrets.

One evening, Mother tells Daughter a story about a tiger spirit who lived in a woman's body. Her name was Hu Gu Po, and she hungered to eat children, especially their toes. Soon afterwards, Daughter awakes with a tiger tail. And more mysterious events follow: Holes in the backyard spit up letters penned by her estranged grandmother; a visiting aunt leaves red on everything she touches; a ghost bird shimmers in an ancient birdcage.

All the while, Daughter is falling for a neighbourhood girl named Ben with mysterious stories of her own. As the two young lovers translate the grandmother's letters, Daughter begins to understand that each woman in her family embodies an old Taiwanese myth, and fears the power of the tiger spirit bristling within her to cause pain. She will have to bring her family's secrets to light in order to derail their destiny.

'What gives me fuel are other books - anything stylish and/or dirty. This year I loved reading K-Ming Chang's Bestiary' Raven Leilani, author of Luster
  • Published: 4 February 2021
  • ISBN: 9781473571723
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 272
Categories:

About the author

K-Ming Chang

K-Ming Chang was born in the year of the tiger. She is a Kundiman Fellow and a Lambda Literary Award finalist in poetry. Her poems have been anthologized inInk Knows No Borders, Best New Poets 2018, Bettering American Poetry Vol. 3, the 2019 Pushcart Prize Anthology, and elsewhere. Raised in California, she now lives in New York.
K-M

Also by K-Ming Chang

Cecilia
Gods of Want
See all

Praise for Bestiary

Gorgeous and gorgeously grotesque . . . Every line of this sensuous, magical-realist marvel-about multiple generations of Taiwanese-American women in Arkansas whose lives are imbued with cultural and familial myth-is utterly alive.

O: The Oprah Magazine

K-Ming Chang's prose ravishes, ravages, rampages. This is an absolute lightning strike of a debut. The world grew brighter as I read it.

Kelly Link, author of GET IN TROUBLE

The poet K-Ming Chang's debut novel, Bestiary, offers up a different kind of narrative, full of magic realism that reaches down your throat, grabs hold of your guts and forces a slow reckoning with what it means to be a foreigner, a native, a mother, a daughter - and all the things in between.

New York Times

What gives me fuel are other books - anything stylish and/or dirty. This year I loved reading K. Ming Chang's Bestiary.

Raven Leilani, author of Luster