A New York Times Notable Book of 2022

Gods of Want

Alert to the ways reality can buckle and contort, Chang conjures fiction that is almost fairytale-like, mythical, unsettling - yet at the same time blisteringly alive and unapologetically queer

DANTIEL W. MONIZ, author of Milk Blood Heat

A voracious, probing collection, proof of how exhilarating the short story can be... Each one is possessed of a powerful hunger, a drive to metabolize the recognizable features of a familiar world and transform them into something wilder, and achingly alive

Constantly illuminating and thoroughly astounding... a stunning and moving work by one of our most brilliant authors.

BRYAN WASHINGTON, author of Lot and Memorial

These stories by the Taiwanese American author of the gutsy 2020 debut novel Bestiary are obsessed with the vagaries of emigration and adolescence. Populated by ghosts and spirits, they dissolve the rigidities of American life into a slipstream of folkloric myth and transform the familiar world into something wilder.

To read K-Ming Chang is to see the world in fresh, surreal technicolor... Both wild and lyrical, visionary and touching. Read her!

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

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

Chang returns with a dazzling collection of stories within stories that draw on old myths to embody the heartache and memories of Asian American women. 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.

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.

Dazzling . . . This stellar collection will leave readers hungry for more.

[K-Ming Chang] rewrites the world as a place of radical transformation.

[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.

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.

[K-Ming Chang] is back with her signature precise and enthralling prose in this short-story collection.

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.

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.

K-Ming Chang is a Kundiman fellow, a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree and an O. Henry Prize winner. She is the author of the novel Bestiary, which was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and Gods of Want, which won the Lambda Literary Award.

*WINNER OF THE 2023 LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD FOR LESBIAN FICTION* 
 
*A New York Times 100 Notable Book of 2022* 
 
'These stories glitter and pulse' Dantiel W. Montiz 
 
In her singular, electrifying style, K-Ming Chang peels back questions of body, power and identity, and the relationships of Asian American women, with vivid imagination. 
 
A stream of women adjust to American life by sneaking kisses from women at temple and buying tubs of vanilla ice cream to prepare for citizenship tests. Ghost-cousins cross space, seas and skies to haunt their living cousin. Two girls explore each other's bodies for the first time in the belly of a plastic shark. 
 
Brimming with moths and mothers, nine-headed birds and storm-chasers, these queer, fabulist tales delve viscerally into myth and memory, corporeality and ghostliness, beauty and the grotesque. 
 
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR in New York Times, NPR, Them and Book Riot, from the National Book Award '5 under 35' honoree and author of Bestiary. 
 
'Wild and lyrical, visionary and touching. Read her!' Sharlene Teo 
 
'A voracious, probing collection, proof of how exhilarating the short story can be' New York Times 
 
'Stunning and moving... One of our most brilliant authors' Bryan Washington

Bestiary

The blazing debut novel about queer desire and buried secrets

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.

A powerful novel that will sit inside you for days after reading

A visceral, magical tale - every sentence is worth savouring.

Kirsty Logan, author of Things We Say in the Dark

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

Chang makes a spell rise from every wound, and I'm caught all the way up in this magic... one of the best emerging writers out there.

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.

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.

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.

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

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!

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 Philips, author of the National Book Award finalist Disappearing Earth

[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.

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, magic 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.

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

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

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 marvelling at 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 Turning and Two Trees Make a Forest

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.

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

K-Ming Chang

[A] thrillingly disorienting novella of queer love and intimate obsession... In this author’s highly original voice, language writhes into new, ultra-sensual imaginings and leads us into an uncanny world where the familiar is made strange

Chang continues to captivate with her lyrical prose and rich storytelling... Cecilia's intricate narrative structure and magical realism creates a hauntingly beautiful tapestry of emotions & experiences. Chang is an inventive voice that deserves to be heard

Touched by magical realism and clearly influenced by the folklore of the author Chang’s upbringing, this novel is at once strange and erotic, with the pairing’s charged relationship leading to gripping consequences

Rowdy and razor-sharp, luminescent and enchanting, K-Ming Chang is an utter master of the strange intimacies of the body

If you're not reading K-MIng Chang, then what are you reading?... A surreal cascade of girlhood memories about desire, queerness, and obsession. Cecilia is at once erotic and repulsive, carnal and tasty. In a word: delicious

Erotic and strange, captivating and twisted: This one’s for the freaks (complimentary)

Chang explores the ways in which the body can elicit both desire and disgust, and offers an original look at the volatility of a teen friendship. It’s another high-water mark from a prolific and provocative author

The work of reading this book leaves the reader with the same feeling one has after eating a particularly indulgent meal—satiation, with the knowledge of more hunger to come

An erotic, surreal novella about the ecstasies of intense friendships and obsessive love 
 
Seven, who works as a cleaner at a chiropractor’s office, re-encounters Cecilia, a woman who has obsessed her since their school days. 
 
As the two of them board the same bus – each dubiously claiming not to be following the other – their chance meeting spurs a series of intensely vivid and corporeal memories. As past and present bleed together, Seven can feel her desire begin to unmoor her from the flow of time. 
 
Smart, subversive and gripping, Cecilia is a winding, misty road trip through bodily transformation, inextricable histories of violence and love, and the ghosts of girlhood friendship.

Cecilia

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K-Ming Chang

Praise for Cecilia

[A] thrillingly disorienting novella of queer love and intimate obsession... In this author’s highly original voice, language writhes into new, ultra-sensual imaginings and leads us into an uncanny world wher ...

Chang continues to captivate with her lyrical prose and rich storytelling... Cecilia's intricate narrative structure and magical realism creates a hauntingly beautiful tapestry of emotions & experiences. C ...

Touched by magical realism and clearly influenced by the folklore of the author Chang’s upbringing, this novel is at once strange and erotic, with the pairing’s charged relationship leading to gripping

[A] thrillingly disorienting novella of queer love and intimate obsession... In this author’s highly original voice, language writhes into new, ultra-sensual imaginings and leads us into an uncanny world wher ...

Chang continues to captivate with her lyrical prose and rich storytelling... Cecilia's intricate narrative structure and magical realism creates a hauntingly beautiful tapestry of emotions & experiences. C ...

Touched by magical realism and clearly influenced by the folklore of the author Chang’s upbringing, this novel is at once strange and erotic, with the pairing’s charged relationship leading to gripping

[A] thrillingly disorienting novella of queer love and intimate obsession... In this author’s highly original voice, language writhes into new, ultra-sensual imaginings and leads us into an uncanny world wher ...

Chang continues to captivate with her lyrical prose and rich storytelling... Cecilia's intricate narrative structure and magical realism creates a hauntingly beautiful tapestry of emotions & experiences. C ...

Touched by magical realism and clearly influenced by the folklore of the author Chang’s upbringing, this novel is at once strange and erotic, with the pairing’s charged relationship leading to gripping

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