Our Take

K-Ming Chang arrived with Bestiary already writing at a frequency most authors spend careers trying to find, and Gods of Want confirms that her debut novel was no fluke. This collection is dense with strangeness in the best possible sense — each story operates by its own internal logic, where aunts and ghost-cousins and women stepped out of advertisements feel entirely inevitable. Chang's surrealism isn't decorative; it's structural, a way of rendering the dislocations of migration, queerness, and familial inheritance with a precision that realist prose often can't reach. The bodies in these stories are insistently present — hungry, haunted, generative — and the myths woven through them are distinctly Taiwanese American, which gives the collection a specificity that makes it feel genuinely new rather than trading on familiar magical realist conventions. Readers who love Carmen Maria Machado's Her Body and Other Parties or Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah's Friday Black will recognize the formal ambition here: short fiction that treats the form as elastic, capable of holding grief and absurdity and desire simultaneously. This is a collection for readers who want their fiction to surprise them at the sentence level, story after story.