Published: 15 November 2022
ISBN: 9781787302693
Imprint: Harvill Secker
Format: Hardback
Pages: 224
RRP: $29.99

Categories:

Share…

Gods of Want

Startling first collection of short stories from a rising talent

K-Ming Chang

Pre-order from…

Amazon

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 'Xífù', 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.

Published: 15 November 2022
ISBN: 9781787302693
Imprint: Harvill Secker
Format: Hardback
Pages: 224
RRP: $29.99

Categories:

Share…

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.

Also by K-Ming Chang

See all

Praise for Gods of Want

These stories glitter and pulse
DANTIEL W. MONIZ, author of Milk Blood Heat

Constantly illuminating and thoroughly astounding... a stunning and moving work by one of our most brilliant authors.
BRYAN WASHINGTON, author of Lot and Memorial

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

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

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