Thank you to Net Galley and Random House for the ARC in exchange for my honest review.  These obscure and strange stories are arranged into three sections - Mothers, Myths and Moths.  Auntland is a story of many aunts finding their way by kissing women and buying vanilla ice cream. Nine Headed Birds is the myth of a 10 headed bird but one head gets severed and rains blood down on the houses below, thus rust.  The narrator's uncle likens this bird to his wife who he abandoned.  Virginia Slims starts with a warning to a girl at school about cigarette advertisements.  She's drawn to one advertisement and she starts talking to her, Virginia, and is entranced and obsessed with her.  All of the stories relate to women's lives, queerness, history and the struggles that are passed through the generations.  This was a very hard read as the stories were so odd and disjointed to reality.  Many times I didn't know what to make of them.  Yet, I appreciated this different style of storytelling although it wasn't for me.

I was given an ARC of this book and neglected it for over a year. Today I forgot my house keys at work and had to take two more trains because I was so invested in reading this. I should have never let it sit on my TBR for as long as it did.

Chang is a force! Her stories are absolute poetry and her poetry is lyricism. I felt so connected to these stories, some of them especially so. This collection is as corporeal as it is whimsical. It moves through you and asks you questions of womanhood, motherhood, livelihood. 

This is a very queer collection that explores gender and family in a new way. Once you read this, you’ll be yearing to read more of Chang’s works.

This was gorgeous, an evocative, painful exploration of queerness, gender, and family. Chang also has the most beautiful, poetic voice. Every story is packed with killer lines like: "I knew all wants were weapons that could be turned on you anytime. I thought of the story about the woman who turned to salt when she looked back at a city. The moral was either you shouldn't look back or you shouldn't be a woman"; "The water was a mosaic of fish. They moved slowly, some with antlers, some carrying lanterns inside their mouths... Light was locked out, staining the surface"; "there had to be a sky for there to be a storm: There had to be an origin for ruin"; and "I want to unbutton the stars with my fingers and forget them inside my fist."

Thank you Penguin Random House and Netgalley for letting me read and review this book. Gods of Want is a short story collection about memories, myths, and relationships of Asian American Women. Some of the stories I really enjoyed and connected with. However, some of the stories I found a little boring or I couldn't connect with. Overall though I liked reading this short story anthology. There are some strong and intriguing stories in here. The writing style is beautiful, lyrical and pretty. 

"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."

This was a collection of short stories that are surreal, queer, and poetic. It took me quite a while to finish, as I actually really enjoyed reading each story on their own.

From the author of the acclaimed novel Bestiary comes this original, queer, hilarious and brave collection of stories centering the lives, loves, labors and longings of Asian American women.

4-4.5 stars.

Gods of Want: Stories is a mesmerizing collection of short stories that incorporates elements of surrealism and explores the experiences and identities of being a queer Asian American woman. The writing is superb, and the unique form utilized by K-Ming Chang makes this book stand out from others in the genre. While not every theme resonated as strongly with me personally, the overall collection was highly enjoyable and thought-provoking. The themes of myth, migration, queerness, and the everyday are skillfully interwoven throughout the stories, and the author's attempt to dissect and examine these themes is both engaging and insightful. I highly recommend this collection to readers who appreciate unconventional and intellectually stimulating literature.

Note: this review was written by me but modified by the openAI chatbot to improve it.

I read the stories Auntland and The Chorus of Dead cousins before deciding that the writing style just isn't for me. Though I think the topics and themes of the stories are important.

Thank you to Netgalley and Random House for a copy of this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I loved Bestiary so much, it was easily one of my favorite books last year. This anthology however just felt very repetitive. The writing is still lush and you could sink your teeth into it but the stories themselves just felt very more of the same and I really struggled with this. I picked up and put this down four times and could not engage with the stories.

What can I say that has not already been said? One of the things I love about anthologies is the ability to space out the stories, but I read this one straight through. At times the connectivity of the stories felt a bit disjointed, but that may be from my lack of experience with surrealistic works. Bonus points because I love lesbians. Gorgeous, Haunting,  Intimate.

This is a tough time to review this because I've read so many spectacular short story collections recently. In particular, I LOVED Bliss Montage by Ling Ma and Bad Thoughts by Nada Alic; both feel similar to Gods of Want in terms of surrealism and dark humor, so it's an admittedly high bar. That said, I just don't think the stream-of-consciousness narrative style worked for me; it somehow felt both repetitive and hard to follow. I held off on rating this wondering if my opinion would change and it hasn't, so this represents my current opinion - but I do wonder if this is a book I'd understand and appreciate more in audiobook form....

Thanks to Random House and NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for my honest opinion.

Gods of Want is a short story collection that is interesting, exciting, and extremely well-written. I liked the variety of themes, I want to read more by this author.

I sometimes struggle with enjoying anthologies, but this one was well done. The cover is what initially peaked my interest and the writing kept me for a wonderful ride.

K-Ming Chang is so damn talented and I wish I were smarter so I could understand all her genius. But the parts I do understand are pretty freaking great! These stories were weird and wonderful and an impressive follow-up to BESTIARY.

Strange, corporeal, queer stories are my niche - this collection challenged me in the best way, playing with magical realism and myth-making throughout. I interviewed K-Ming Chang and she's a delight to chat with. Chang is a singular voice and I am very excited to follow her work. Interview: https://youtu.be/G22UZykjlyo

Really enjoyed this book. Great pacing and story.   K-Ming Chang really drew me into the story. I understood the characters. Finished this in one sitting.

Thank you to NetGalley and One World for the e-book! Gods of Want is an obscure surreal collection of short stories. While some of the stories in here were really interesting, the surrealism was so much at times that it was very difficult to hold my attention on many of them. I can tell K-Ming Chang is a great writer by her way with words but I think I would prefer her writing style in the format of a novel rather than a short story compilation.

Amazing and unique!  I loved this so much!  I went and bought a copy just to always have.  I just loved how bold these stories were!  Loved it!

Some of these were inspiring and enjoyable, and I appreciated the writing, while others took a sharp left turn and had repetitive phrases, imagery that wasn't enjoyable, and odd stories that I just couldn't get into. I appreciate what she was doing with this but it mostly just wasn't my thing, despite all the odds being stacked for me to enjoy this.

I didn’t know what to expect when I started this collection of short stories, and I was joyfully surprised. Although it is all prose, it is surrealist and fantastical and lyrical in such a way that it often read as poetry, and I devoured the stories. Although the stories are hypothetically independent, the overwhelming majority of them are written in the first person, and although the narrators of each story may have different names or family relationships and so on, they all still felt connected. It felt like reading a fantastical, fictionalized auto-biography that had been fed through a wood-chipper and fed to birds to warble as they flew above a community of love, loss, flesh, grief, violence, longing, despair, and hope, singing songs of mournful elegies and operatic youthful discoveries and the joy of being seen and known as something truer than what most people think you to be, even when it took trauma or grief to unearth that person before celebrating them.

It’s hard to say much else. While some stories felt stronger to me than others, by and large I enjoyed the writing style, the weirdness, the repression, the longing dripping from each comma.  It just worked, and pointed at things more important than historical fact or truth when understanding the story of being. Some stories, some lines, some phrases, some ideas struck me really deep, enough to easily swim past the moments that didn’t connect to me at that moment. Enough that I had to stop and read them again, and again. 

“Sometimes she’ll leave him a plate of fish outside the door with no chopsticks and say, 'Let him eat like a dog.' I fall asleep waiting by the door and wake to the scrape of his nails against the plate, a pitch higher than prayer. I don’t yet know how to name the shame of that sound. I can only wait silently on the other side of his hunger.”

If you are hoping for little independent stories with clear-cut protagonists and plots and so forth, this collection may not add up to a whole lot for you. But when read as one single, weird biography understood through differently darkened mirrors it really shines. Each story is populated with characters, family and friends, that all feel very real, even when only a few details are offered to each. The phantasmagorical creates the perfect place for genuine authenticity, a reality unable to find itself in straight narration. If that’s a journey you’re willing to take, I can’t recommend it highly enough.

I want to thank NetGalley and Random House Publishing Group - Random House, One World, who provided a complimentary eARC in exchange for an honest review.