*WINNER OF THE 2023 LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD FOR LESBIAN FICTION*

'Wild and lyrical, visionary and touching. Read her!' Sharlene Teo

Surreal and seductive, Gods of Want is a startling first collection from a rising talent - one of the '5 Under 35' National Book Award honorees and author of Bestiary.

These original stories brim with moths, myths, memories and mothers, nine-headed birds, ghost cousins and storm-chasers - and delve into corporeality and ghostliness, queerness and the quotidian, with boundless imagination. K-Ming Chang's storytelling is fierce, fabulist and feminist.

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 'Xifu', 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.

An electrifying and singular new voice in fiction, K-Ming Chang has been heralded by writers including RAVEN LEILANI, DANEZ SMITH, KIRSTY LOGAN, KELLY LINK, JULIA PHILIPS, TASH AW, ELAINE CASTELLO, JENNIFER TSENG and JUSTIN TORRES.

*A New York Times Notable Book of 2022*

'Stunning and moving... One of our most brilliant authors' Bryan Washington

'These stories glitter and pulse' Dantiel W. Montiz

'A voracious, probing collection, proof of how exhilarating the short story can be' New York Times

About the Author
K-Ming Chang is a Kundiman fellow, a Lambda Literary Award finalist and a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree. She is the author of the novel Bestiary, which was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, the PEN/Faulkner Award and the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award.

Reviews
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 glitter and pulse -- 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 -- Alexandra Kleeman * New York Times Book Review *
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. -- 100 Notable Books of 2022 * New York Times *
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
A whole body experience. * THEM *
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



Book Information
ISBN 9781787302693
Author K-Ming Chang
Format Hardback
Page Count 224
Imprint Harvill Secker
Publisher Vintage Publishing
Weight(grams) 346g
Dimensions(mm) 222mm * 144mm * 24mm