This short story collection feels like a fever dream: it’s abstract, surreal, and poetic in a way that makes you question what’s real and what’s imagined. The writing is beautiful and unapologetic. At times, the stories are highly jarring, disturbing, and crude. I loved that this collection explored sexuality, womanhood, death, and family. Although this is a unique collection with lush descriptions, I don’t feel like I was the demographic for this book. It will absolutely find its audience, as it deserves, but for me, a lot of the stories went over my head and nothing ever felt tangible. I’m glad I read it and will pick up any future stories from Chang in hopes maybe future work will connect with me more than this one!

My favorite stories were Auntland, Nuwa, Xifu, Homophone, and Mariela.

Thank you Random House, One World, and Netgalley for a free copy in exchange for my honest review!

A collection of short stories brimming with imagination. Surreal, strange, vivid, gay, sometimes just plain old weird. K Ming Chang is a huge talent. A collection best savored slowly.

Chang's stories are vibrant and have the flow of poetry, the lilt of songs and the sombre sound of grief. The women and girls on these pages are defined and indefinable; they are sisters, mothers, lovers, nieces, and in-laws. The ways in which Chang centres these beings really speaks to how their strength, perseverance, hard work  and desires are tethers for family, relationships, and societies.

With each story there are ways of being and existing that are culturally specific but also recognizable. What can be lost in emigrating and who and what is kept? Chang also uses phrases that are cryptic yet encapsulate what it means to be othered, to be queer, and to exist in a world where certain identities are derided and not accepted.

These stories roam from the fantastical to our shared realities and to a mirrored realism where nature rebels and everything is flipped upside down. Not all are smooth reads, but there are those that are infused with style and verve.

Gods of Want is a collection of short stories written by K-Ming Chang, whose Bestiary took the literary world by storm back in 2020. This time, Chang explores the themes of family, ghosts, queerness, and culture. The main characters are all Asian or Asian American women and their female perspective works incredibly well with the magical realism and fantasy elements of the plot. It’s difficult to explain or even describe the stories properly, because they’re hauntingly surreal, to the point that at times they feel like fever dreams. Even though that surrealism sometimes verges on being confusing and might be an acquired taste for some, I loved it. It made the stories feel more intimate and the images that Chang created will stay with me for a long time. I was fascinated by the eerie strangeness combined with beautiful prose, and I can’t wait for Chang’s next work.

TLDR: Gods of Want is a stunning, immersive collection that completely pulled me in. If you enjoy lyrical, dream-like stories that aren’t always easy, you will love it too.

Overall, this book made me feel a lot of feelings. It was definitely a lot most of the time but it was intriguing to read and I definitely recommend it highly. I think all the short stories were excellent on their own, but also fit cohesively together
THINGS I LIKED
The title was fantastic. 
Prose is absolutely gorgeous and 
I love how the stories are distinct, but also somehow connected
I love the imagery and details, especially in the second story 
I thought the supernatural elements being treated as a natural part of the world was so, so fascinating. There wasn't any huge, long backstory given which was perfect
The book is very heavy but doesn't dwell on intense topics like suicide, instead choosing to focus on the main themes of each story while acknowledging the weight of these terrible events. 
I like how each story has its own individual arc, if it is structured in a narrative arc and the others don't need to have one to be whole and complete (ie the first story was more of a poem) 

THINGS I DIDN'T LIKE
I wish there were paragraph break sin the first story  because sometimes things just flowed together and I couldn't pay attention to individual lines unless I went back and reread it a couple times which wasn't enjoyable. I understand this is a cool stylistic choice but it felt like a lot in my opinion. 
I wanted more development in a couple of the stories. I know they're short but sometimes it felt rushed

DNF at 25%. The writing is incredibly evocative and a mastery of surrealism, but the repeated disturbing imagery was too much for me.

Interesting work from an author I don't know enough about yet. I'm interested to see what else I can pick up from her.

4.5/5

there is something so personal to me about these stories — maybe because i read them entrenched in yilan's molten heat, or maybe it's the beehive excavated from my walls or the hometown buffet trips of my childhood. either way, reading gods of want was a little like feeling known. 

i can't remember how i stumbled across this arc but i'm immensely grateful for it. chang is an absolutely moving, stunning writer that unscaffolds the boundaries of prose and verse. strange and ominous and beautiful, gods of want strikes deeply with the ferocity of its idiosyncrasies, the poetry of its surrealism. while anomalous and therefore at times impenetrable, i'm looking forward to coming back to it again and learning from it. natural violence, gaysian yearning, paranormal ontologies — there is so much to unspool from this collection. chang is an absolutely incandescent writer, and i'm excited to read more. 

Much thanks to NetGalley and Random House for the free eARC in exchange for an honest review.

I didn't realize...or perhaps remember when I picked this title that it was a collection rather than a novel, but I'm glad it was. Short stories are such a good way to experience an unfamiliar author's different styles and capabilities, and K-Ming Chang didn't disappoint. 

This collection mostly centers around the raw truths of being a queer woman in modern society. There is heavy cultural significance in almost all the stories as well, plus family and, well, just *living*. As in any collection, there are stories that I felt were extremely powerful and some I felt were weaker, but on the whole, K-Ming Chang has crafted a really fabulous collection here. It took me a while to work my way through all stories -- something like 15 or 16 of them? -- but it's completely worth taking your time to really feel the individual stories and let them sit with you.

I absolutely enjoyed reading this collection of short stories. K-Ming’s prose is poetic, haunting, and gorgeous. The stories ebb and flow beautifully, mixing myths and stories of migration, bodies, and queerness. 

There were some stories that I sat with before moving on with the rest of the book, like “The Chorus of Dead Cousins” and “Resident Aliens.”

After reading this, I was left so emotional. What a powerful book. 

Thanks to NetGalley and Random House / One World for providing me this ARC. This book comes out on July 12!

“Meimei asked me how come the blood was just coming now, and I said sometimes with a death there’s a delayed reaction, like sometimes it takes a long time for the blood to come back once it’s been cut loose. It doesn’t want to come back, to be bricked inside a body, to be shown a shape. It wants to snake away and breed with other red things.”

A great collection unlike anything I’ve ever read before. It’s smart, witty, and beautifully written. It covers a large range of complex issues in innovative and surrealistic ways, while always placing its characters and their relationships at the center of the story. There are so many things happening in every story that it can be a little overwhelming or chaotic at times, although everything feels essential. In fact, I think some of them could have been a bit longer, some of the themes expanded on. I preferred the first section, “Mothers,” to the more experimental sections “Myths” and “Moths.” The lyricism of the prose, although beautiful, sometimes left me wanting more.

Thanks to NetGalley for the opportunity to read and review!

At turns captivating and cringe-worthy, Gods of Want is evocative and poetic. I found this title best read while barely lucid myself before bed, my own consciousness fading in and out with the narrator's winding stories -- disoriented and being pulled under, suddenly I'd snap to in a fit of queer recognition. 

Chang's writing is effective and commanding in ways that feel both satisfying and gratuitous. I'm hot-and-cold with short stories generally, so I'm always hesitant to give an overall impression of a collection like this, but I will say that across the board she is a master at crafting imagery that seems to defy the senses and yet feel viscerally true.

K-Ming Chang is, according to an interview in The Rumpus, a “beacon of Gen Z excellence” and is one of those people who make me feel bad about how little I’ve done with my life (https://therumpus.net/2020/09/30/the-rumpus-interview-with-k-ming-chang/). She already has a poetry collection and a novel out—Bestiary, which was published in 2020. Gods of Want is her first full-length short-story collection. I originally planned on reviewing this for Strange Horizons because I’m a fan, but another reviewer at the magazine beat me to the punch and got dibs first. No hard feelings haha.

Where is the line between real and imaginary, and what kind of truths do the stories that our families pass down, even the most absurd ones, contain? What lessons do queer daughters learn from their mothers? Gods of Want takes a stab at answering these questions. Chang uses a surreal, fabulist lens to examine the Taiwanese American and Chinese American immigrant experiences. From the ghosts of dead cousins in “The Chorus of the Dead” following around a newly married couple to a girl who becomes something akin to a mermaid following a flood in “Dykes,” she skillfully uses imagery to make myths of the lives of ordinary first and second generation immigrants, many of which are queer women.

The collection is organized into three sections: “Mothers,” “Myths,” and “Moths.” The “Mothers” section is more accurately about relationships between older women and the younger generation. Specifically, the central relationships in this section are those where women are at the center: mothers and daughters, mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law, and aunts and nieces. “Myths” is concerned with the stories, both true and false, passed down to the second generation in these immigrant families. Gods of Want is concerned with ghosts and how they affect their family in the present, and nowhere is this more obvious as it is in the section “Moths.” As explained in the first story of “Moths,” “Resident Aliens,” moths in Chinese folklore contain the souls of the dead, and all the stories in this section are about literal and figurative ghosts.

Gods of Want stretches traditional genre labels, eschewing them in favor of telling truths about families and the stories and worlds passed down between generations. The boundary between what is real and what is mythical or fable is somewhere between hazy to nonexistent in Chang's stories. Reading them is a bit of a trust fall, and Chang successfully brings together wildly disparate elements into cohesive stories.

Did not finish this short story collection. I was really looking forward to reading this but the stories made me quite uncomfortable. This may have been the intent of the author but it just wasn't for me.

i'm afraid the surrealism in this collection defeated me. i loved the first three stories (the ones i read) for their writing and their originality and brilliance, but i don't have in me the mental bandwidth for a whole book of surrealist stories. so very sorry.

16 vivid, poetic, and haunting snapshots of the queer AAPI experience. These stories are a lovely blend of fantasy and reality; K-Ming Chang expertly weaves these two [seemingly] opposing components into a masterpiece—these elements work together (along with her beautiful diction and her ability to craft a seamless plot with multiple moving parts) to create a rawness that feels like these stories were plucked straight out of my own heart. I found pieces of myself in every single story: I gobbled down these tales of Asian mothers and childhood crushes and first queer romances, and I FELT them. I feel like I have been searching my entire life for a story that mirrors my experiences—as both a queer woman AND an Asian-American woman, not just one or the other—and K-Ming Chang has finally fulfilled my wish. 

Many thanks to Random House Publishing and NetGalley for the advance copy provided in exchange for an honest review.

Stunning. Eerie, beautiful stories, full of magic, ghosts, family history, desire, bodies, queerness. The prose is miraculous it sings. I wanted to wrap myself up in its music and never come up for air. Chang delights in language, and it shows. Even when she's writing about heartbreak, war, pain, the violence of migration and racism, the shadows of intergenerational trauma, the words she uses are almost too beautiful to look at. Inventive and moving. One of the best collections I've read this year.

Well-written but not a style or narrative voice I enjoy, and all of the stories seemed interchangeable

"And then you tell your daughter all the stories in history about mothers-in-law who beat concubines to death with a chamber pot, mothers-in-law who rip themselves open by shoving their sons' full-grown heads back inside themselves, sometimes up the wrong hole..." 

I received an ARC copy of this book from Netgalley, and I'm so glad I did. The cover initially drew me to it because it's gorgeous, but the prose kept me engrossed throughout the book. This author has a serious way with words that had me laughing and nodding solemnly all at once. The author embellishes and exaggerates these things that, at the heart of the matter, we can all relate to and understand, at least to an extent. 

I also really enjoyed how this book was sectioned off. It made reading between chores, or during a drive really easy, because I could finish a story and bookmark the next. While I don't think the writing will be for everyone, I do recommend giving this a read. As a half-Chinese woman with a mother who grew up in Taiwan, I found a lot of the stories interesting from that standpoint, where I could read something and nod my head and be like "yes, that's how my nainai was as well" , etc. I particularly liked Mandarin Speakers and Meals for Mourners.

Reading this book was (and I cannot stress enough that this IS, absolutely, a compliment) a little like having a migraine aura: the worlds that K-Ming Chang create have the same strange, rippling, and almost worryingly beautiful quality. As the rating indicates, I loved this collection; I was fascinated by it; I couldn't quite bring myself to look away, even when what faced me was, occasionally, viscerally disconcerting. I have been thinking about it since I started it, and I'm not sure I will stop doing so anytime soon. 

The stories in this collection are connected largely by what I might think of as leitmotifs – there were plenty, but water, mouths, and eating came up again and again, most notably, for me. This is definitely the kind of book I could read several times and still feel like I haven't completely grasped.

Particular favorites: "Dykes," "Nüwa," "Mariela," and "The Chorus of Dead Cousins." But every story in here was absolutely worth the read; while I always find that there are some stories I like more or less in a collection like this, I didn't feel like any of them were "weak links" in the collection, and its cohesiveness was honestly quite stunning. 

I will absolutely be recommending this one far and wide; what a strange and uncomfortable delight. (I do also think Bestiary is moving up to the top of my TBR pile.) Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for an e-ARC.