“Lurid, funny, strange, and deftly sorrowing— an important new voice.” gods of want
GODS OF WANT
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Chang, K-Ming One World/Random House (224 pp.) $27.00 | July 12, 2022 978-0-593-24158-5
Crouch, Blake Ballantine (352 pp.) $28.00 | July 12, 2022 978-0-593-15753-4
… master of the uncanny …
Harold Jaffe, Fulbright and NEA Fellow
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Small Press Distribution OR Ingram “… master of the uncanny … ” Harold Jaffe
“… tales that echo like prophecy … ”
… just what brave new world of storytelling is this? Playful and
Sarah Blackman
effortlessly pleasurable … powerfully human.
Curtis White, Essayist and experimental fiction writer
and mesmerizes.
Meg Tuite, Author of Meet My Haze
… compelling and memorable fictions that will … reawaken you to the strangeness of the familiar world …
George Looney, Author of The Worst May Be Over and Ode to the Earth in Translation
Suburban Death Project Aimee Parkison
Suburban Death Project
… scrapes the nerve and pierces the heart. Parkison detonates
y o u n g a d u lt
Praise for Suburban Death Project
When a government agent is exposed to a virus that modifies his genetic code, he must consider whether to share these enhancements with the world or eradicate the virus. Logan Ramsay works for the Gene Protection Agency in a world where genetic modification has wreaked havoc on the ecosystem. His mother, a brilliant scientist, was responsible for the “Great Starvation” nearly two decades before, when she tried to improve the resistance of a rice plant to a particular virus and instead devastated the world’s rice supply. Two hundred million people died, and Logan went to prison for his role in the catastrophe; his mother took her own life. Now he investigates and takes down people
Aimee Parkison
Composed of 16 short stories that explore the immigrant experience, this book traces a line from old worlds to new worlds by means of the bloody umbilical cords that stretch between them. Chang returns to the thematic territory of her debut novel, Bestiary (2020), in these stories that unthread the tangled relationships between mothers and daughter, aunts and cousins, siblings and lovers in the broadly defined Taiwanese immigrant community now living in California. The stories progress through their antic, sometimes manic, often bloody, muddy, orgasmic, or chewed-up and spit-out paces. In “The Chorus of Dead Cousins,” an endlessly proliferating infestation of dead cousins threatens to drive away the speaker’s new wife with their poltergeist mischief, including farting in the minister’s face at the wedding and replacing all of the wife’s teeth with the red-dyed shells of melon seeds in the night. In “Nüwa,” named for the mother goddess of Chinese mythology who is often depicted as having a long, serpentine body, the train that passes the narrator and her sister Meimei’s house at night may also be a snake who is responsible for devouring all the girls that have gone missing in their neighborhood. In “Resident Aliens,” the speaker, her mother, and her seven aunts “share two bedrooms and rent out the basement—what had once been a slaughterhouse, with hooks that snagged on our shadows and no windows but our mouths,” to a series of 26 widows, each upping the fairy-tale ante on the one who came before. Separated into three sections—“Mothers,” “Myths,” and “Moths”—the book signals its lingual play from the table of contents on. Indeed, the ease with which the various narrators shift into poetic transcendence in their workaday descriptions coupled with the linguistic flexibility of non-native idioms repurposed for a new English in a new world is as much a part of the storytelling as the stories themselves. All this together leaves the reader with 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.
… tales that echo like prophecy as they underline, again and again, the inescapably beautiful now.
Sarah Blackman, Author of Mother Box and Hex Aimee Parkison is widely published and the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including: the Catherine
Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize; the
Sometimes at night, I venture into the yard to stand beside the decaying pontoon boat. That’s how I first saw the neighborhood ambassador owl and realized the
Kurt Vonnegut Prize from North American Review; the Starcherone Prize for
owl was calling to me, letting itself be known as owls rarely do. I wanted to explain
Innovative Fiction; a Christopher Isherwood Fellowship,
a North Carolina Arts Council Fellowship, a Writers at Work
to the owl it was too late for me. I no longer went on trips to search for nests in
Fellowship, a Puffin Foundation Fellowship, and a William
Randolph Hearst Creative Artists Fellowship. She currently in
caves, tree hollows, bridges, and buildings. Gone were my childhood visits to caves
the MFA/PhD program at Oklahoma State University. Photograph by Abelardo Reyes Gurrola
$27.95 ISBN 978-0-9913780-4-3
littered with droppings, pellets scattered amid golden-brown feathers.
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unboundedition.com
“Gothic tales that … resemble that master of the uncanny, Patricia Highsmith. High praise.” Harold Jaffe
Fulbright and NEA Fellow, Author of 28 books
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kirkus.com
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fiction
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15 may 2022
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