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

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 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.

Publishers Weekly (starred review)

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

Alexandra Kleeman, New York Times Book Review

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

Guardian

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.

100 Notable Books of 2022, New York Times

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

New York Times Book Review

[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.

San Francisco Chronicle

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.

Los Angeles Times

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

Shondaland

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.

Esquire

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.

Bryan Washington, Electric Literature

A whole body experience.

THEM

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

Publishers Weekly (starred review)