Bestiary: A Novel (2020)

“Told by many voices, Bestiary is a queer, transnational fairy tale whose irresistible heroine is a Taiwanese American baby dyke. Written in a prose style as inventive and astonishing as the story it tells, to read it is to enter a world where the female body possesses enormous power, where the borders between generations are porous and shifting. A worthy heir to Maxine Hong Kingston, Lois-Ann Yamanaka, and Jamaica Kincaid, K-Ming Chang is a woman warrior for the 21st century—part oracle, part witness, all heart.” - Jennifer Tseng

About BESTIARY:

Three generations of Taiwanese American women are haunted by the myths of their homeland in this spellbinding, visceral debut about 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. She was called 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 grandmother; a visiting aunt arrives with snakes in her belly; a brother tests the possibility of flight. All the while, Daughter is falling for Ben, a neighborhood girl with strange powers of her own. As the two young lovers translate the grandmother’s letters, Daughter begins to understand that each woman in her family embodies a myth–and that she will have to bring her family’s secrets to light in order to change their destiny.

With a poetic voice of crackling electricity, K-Ming Chang is an explosive young writer who combines the wit and fabulism of Helen Oyeyemi with the subversive storytelling of Maxine Hong Kingston. Tracing one family’s history from Taiwan to America, from Arkansas to California, Bestiary is a novel of migration, queer lineages, and girlhood.

Click here to read an interview about Bestiary!

Order here (US), here (UK), here (Canada), or here (Germany)

“‘If we stayed here,’ she said, ‘and the water kept outgrowing us, what do you think would happen?’ I told her we’d drown, but Ben said I was wrong. We’d grow gills, she said.”

Praise for Bestiary

“Told by many voices, BESTIARY is a queer, transnational fairy tale whose irresistible heroine is a Taiwanese American baby dyke. Written in a prose style as inventive and astonishing as the story it tells, to read it is to enter a world where the female body possesses enormous power, where the borders between generations are porous and shifting. A worthy heir to Maxine Hong Kingston, Lois-Ann Yamanaka, and Jamaica Kincaid, K-Ming Chang is a woman warrior for the 21st century—part oracle, part witness, all heart.”

- Jennifer Tseng, author of Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness

"K-Ming Chang is ferociously talented, one of my favorite new writers. She understands the language of desire and secrecy. Here is a book so wise; so gripping; so mythical and dangerous; so infused with surreal beauty, it burns to be read, and read again."

- Justin Torres, author of We the Animals

In BESTIARY, K-Ming Chang upturns earth and language in equal measure. Every page is percussive, hypnotizing, and maddeningly smart. I am stunned by the imaginative reach of this debut, the remarkable prose. Chang isn’t just a new voice in the landscape; she is building a new landscape entirely.

- T Kira Madden, author of Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls

"Fierce and funny, full of magic and grit, BESTIARY is the most searching exploration of love and belonging I’ve read in a long time. Family, immigrant, queer, magical realist — none of these tags can quite capture the energy of this startling novel, which is all of those things, yet somehow more. K-Ming Chang has created something truly remarkable."

- Tash Aw, author of We, the Survivors

"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

“To read K-Ming Chang is to see the world in fresh, surreal technicolor. Hers is a dizzyingly imaginative, sharp-witted voice queering migration, adolescence and questions of family and belonging in totally new and unexpected ways. Both wild and lyrical, visionary and touching. Read her!”

- Sharlene Teo, author of Ponti

“BESTIARY is crafted at the scale of epic poetry: origin stories that feel at once gravely older than their years, yet viscerally contemporary.  Chang knows well that the life of a family—marriage, immigration, queer coming-of-age—can so often feel like a wild and tender myth, being spun and unspun by its members, again and again.  These are fables I wish I’d had growing up.”

- Elaine Castillo, author of America Is Not the Heart

“Epic and intimate at once, BESTIARY brings myth to visceral life, showing what becomes of women and girls who carry tigers, birds, and fish within. K-Ming Chang's talent exposes what is hidden inside us. She makes magic on the page.”

- Julia Phillips, author of Disappearing Earth

"BESTIARY is shockingly original. K-Ming Chang writes with ferocity and vitality, shaping her raw materials — history and memory, personal and cultural — into a dense, rich amalgam of dream, poem, fable and myth. I didn't read this novel so much as become immersed in it, a jungle filled with surprises, countless moments of desire and pain and light."

- Charles Yu, author of Interior Chinatown

"BESTIARY’s magical and exuberant language spins Taiwan, ancestors, intergenerational trauma, immigration, and love into a world that is simultaneously mythical and viscerally real. This searing, lush novel can’t be justly summarized—you must read it yourself, for K-Ming Chang is a fearless, singular talent."

- Shawna Yang Ryan, author of Green Island

In BESTIARY, K-Ming Chang pays homage to earlier Asian American brilliance while innovating and pushing up against its boundaries. This is an inventive novel that lays bare the beauty and filth of life. That refuses to separate them. Chang shatters our expectations of kinship and legacy and the ways those stories are to be told. Philosophically rich, Bestiary is a debut by a writer we’ll be hearing about for years to come.

- Jenny Heijun Wills, author of Older Sister. Not Necessarily Related.

"This book astounded me, unsettled me, and left me envious of K-Ming Chang's talent. BESTIARY is a gleaming, meticulously crafted gem. I could spend all day marveling Chang's prose; these are sentences you want to climb inside, relish, and read again and again just for the pleasure of the language."

- Jessica J. Lee, author of Two Trees Make a Forest

““[A] vivid, fabulist debut...the prose is full of imagery. Chang’s wild story of a family’s tenuous grasp on belonging in the U.S. stands out with a deep commitment to exploring discomfort with the body and its transformations.”

- Publishers Weekly

“A visceral book that promises a major new literary voice.”

- Kirkus Reviews (Starred review)