Gods of Want: Stories
“A whole body experience.”—THEM
“In all this queer dead wetness, there’s a refusal to be contained: within a body, within a grave, within a dimension.”
- Nell Stevens, The New Yorker
“A lifeblood of desire courses through the bodies of the girls and women peopling the stories – a desire to love, lust, live and thrive.” —NPR
Girls kiss girls, taste one another’s faces and blood, lapping one another up with an eerie eroticism that is tinged by childhood intimacy, but also decidedly queer.
- Author Alexandra Kleeman, NYT Book Review
“Gods of Want…reaffirms her place as one of our most enchanting storytellers today. In these pages, you’ll find ghost cousins, a lot of aunts, haunting mother-in-laws—essentially, women who are trying to make it work. From every first sentence, she has you hooked. In ‘Auntland,’ the first story, we begin: ‘I had an aunt who went to the dentist and asked to have her tongue pulled.’ Her tongue!
So much of the joy of reading K-Ming Chang’s stories is in her ability to constantly surprise. In ‘Xífù,’ she starts with: ‘I don’t mean I want her to die. I’m just saying, what kind of woman pretends to kill herself six times?’ Every sentence bites down. There’s a wry matter-of-factness that makes you buy into all the surreal elements. There’s a dark humor that makes you lean in closer.” –Katie Yee, associate editor at LitHub
GODS OF WANT
Startling stories that center the bodies, memories, myths, and relationships of Asian American women, from the National Book Award “5 Under 35” honoree and author of Bestiary
In “Auntland,” a steady stream of aunts adjust to American life by sneaking surreptitious kisses from women at temple, buying tubs of vanilla ice cream to prepare for citizenship tests, and hatching plans to name their daughter “Dog.” In “The Chorus of Dead Cousins,” ghost-cousins cross space, seas, and skies to haunt their live-cousin, wife to a storm-chaser. In “Xífù,” a mother-in-law tortures a wife in increasingly unsuccessful attempts to rid the house of her. In “Mariela,” two girls explore one another’s bodies for the first time in the belly of a plastic shark while in “Virginia Slims,” a woman from a cigarette ad comes to life. And in “Resident Aliens,” a former slaughterhouse serves as a residence to a series of widows, each harboring her own calamitous secrets.
With each tale, K-Ming Chang gives us her own take on a surrealism that mixes myth and migration, corporeality and ghostliness, queerness and the quotidian. Stunningly told in her feminist fabulist style, these are uncanny stories peeling back greater questions of power and memory.
It will be released on July 12, 2022 in the U.S. and July 14, 2022 in the U.K.!
Forthcoming from One World/Random House in the US (July 2022), Harvill Secker in the UK (2022), and Hanser Berlin in Germany
Praise for GODS OF WANT
“In the genre of feminine madness, these stories are to be worshiped. 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 Black Jesus and Other Superheroes and How to Wrestle a Girl
“These stories glitter and pulse, announcing Chang, with her second book, as a front-runner of innovation anew. 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 Moniz, author of Milk Blood Heat
The beauty, humor, and brilliance throughout Gods of Want shines brightly from story to story - Chang's collection is constantly illuminating and thoroughly astounding. K-Ming Chang's mastery of language, and the boundlessness of her empathy, make for a strange, hilarious, and unforgettable read. Gods of Want is a gift and a masterclass, a stunning and moving work by one of our most brilliant authors.
- Bryan Washington, author of Lot and Memorial
"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 & Corina and Woman of Light
“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
“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.”
- Publishers Weekly, starred review
