Publishers Weekly
★ 03/11/2024
A 24-year-old woman is flooded with fraught memories of her early teen years after encountering an estranged friend in Chang’s striking latest (after Organ Meats). Seven works as a cleaner in a chiropractor’s office and still lives at home with her mother and grandmother Ama, whose fantastical stories shape the family’s mythology and Seven’s obsession with human waste (Ama says she was thrown into a well as an infant, then later rescued from a nearby city’s toilet and immediately put to work cleaning it). At her job, Seven listens through the bathroom door while others pee, visualizing the receptionist’s discreet trickle as “the rain in movies.” Her odd routine is upended by the appearance of Cecilia, whom she hasn’t seen since they were 13. As they ride the bus together, Seven reminisces about eating Cecilia’s stray hairs and chewed-up snacks in middle school, and how the two would practice kissing in the school bathroom. Their friendship dissolved after a bizarre sexual encounter, which produced mutual feelings of hurt and shame. As Chang works up to the details of that incident, she explores the ways in which the body can elicit both desire and disgust, and offers an original look at the volatility of a teen friendship. It’s another high-water mark from a prolific and provocative author. Agent: Julia Kardon, HG Literary. (May)
From the Publisher
Praise for Cecilia
Literary Hub, "Most Anticipated Books of 2024"
Bookshop.org “100 Most Anticipated Books of 2024”
Autostraddle "69 Most Anticipated Queer Books for Spring 2024"
Bustle "This Spring's 44 Most Anticipated Books"
The Millions, “Most Anticipated Books of Spring 2024”
“Chang explores the ways in which the body can elicit both desire and disgust, and offers an original look at the volatility of a teen friendship. It’s another high-water mark from a prolific and provocative author.” —Publishers Weekly starred review
“The work of reading this book leaves the reader with the same feeling one has after eating a particularly indulgent meal—satiation, with the knowledge of more hunger to come." —Kirkus Reviews
“The erotic, surreal tale promises to encapsulate the reader in a state of poetic realism amidst unifying experiences.” —Hunar Bhatia, Harper’s Bazaar India
"Chang pollutes the girls’ innocence with stories and images both repulsive and creative, frightening and empowering." —Emily Rhodes,The Guardian
"A surreal cascade of girlhood memories about desire, queerness, and obsession. Cecilia is at once erotic and repulsive, carnal and tasty. In a word: delicious." —McKayla Coyle, Literary Hub
“Bound to be surreal and sexy like all of Chang’s work." —Autostraddle
“Erotic and strange, captivating and twisted: This one’s for the freaks (complimentary).” —Bustle
“Resplendent with ripe imagery and provocative sensuality, Cecilia is a striking, singular novella that explores pure, pungent desire.” —Joe Hoeffner, BookBrowse
“Cecilia appeals not only to lovers of the strange, but to anyone who’s had the impulse to quietly stalk their high school crush online.” —David Lewis, The Masters Review
“The novel's focus never wavers under the urgent verve of Chang's prose. Her sentences are packed with internal rhyme and assonance, her metaphors drawn on corporeal imagery.” —Cory Oldweiler, The Star Tribune
“A novel that reveals the power—and dangers—of women’s friendships through evocative, uncanny prose.” —Jenna Lefkowitz, Foreword Reviews
"K-Ming Chang’s spell-binding tale of queer desire moved me to tears by the end. Seven’s obsession with Cecilia is rendered through lyrical prose that startled and disarmed me, reminding me of how vulnerable and frightening it is to want someone you are destined to lose. The narrative voice got under my skin and I couldn’t stop thinking about the characters’ fierce hunger for the freedom to be themselves." —Nghiem Tran
“The fantastic and the mundane marry each other like crows on the phantasmagoric pages of Cecilia. K-Ming Chang’s work is bioluminescent and breathtaking. Sharply written and ecologically aware, Cecilia is a magnificent, magical work that will redefine speculative writing for years to come.” —Vi Khi Nao
"An incendiary look at desire's ability to bind and destroy. Fierce, erotic, devastating: Cecilia is a work of genius.” —Brynne Rebele-Henry
“Cecilia is one of those rare reads bursting with staggering imagination and poetry that makes you feel you're having an out-of-body experience with the turn of every page. Not only that, it's also incredibly profound, often disturbing and funny.” —Fernando A. Flores
“Rowdy and razor-sharp, luminescent and enchanting, K-Ming Chang is an utter master of the strange intimacies of the body. To read her work feels like shining a flashlight, finally, on the secret desires and aches that you've always wanted to glimpse." —Alexandra Kleeman
Past Praise:
Praise for Bestiary
Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award
Longlisted for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award
Longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize
“Full of magic realism that reaches down your throat, grabs hold of your guts and forces a slow reckoning with what it means to be a foreigner, a native, a mother, a daughter—and all the things in between.”—The New York Times Book Review
Praise for Gods of Want
Winner of the Lambda Literary Award
“In the genre of feminine madness, these stories are to be worshiped. 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
“These stories glitter and pulse, announcing Chang, with her second book, as a front-runner of innovation anew. Full of mythic desire, joy and pain disguised as the other, and navigating the precarious balance of how to belong to a land while still belonging to oneself, Gods of Want is bursting with language and images so striking, so sure of their own strength, I found myself stunned. The worlds and characters depicted in these pages are original, strange, sometimes horrific, and all the more gorgeous because of it." —Dantiel Moniz
“The beauty, humor, and brilliance throughout Gods of Want shines brightly from story to story—Chang's collection is constantly illuminating and thoroughly astounding. K-Ming Chang's mastery of language, and the boundlessness of her empathy, make for a strange, hilarious, and unforgettable read. Gods of Want is a gift and a masterclass, a stunning and moving work by one of our most brilliant authors.” —Bryan Washington
Praise for K-Ming Chang
National Book Foundation 5 Under 35
“[K-Ming Chang] rewrites the world as a place of radical transformation.” —The New York Times Book Review
Kirkus Reviews
2024-02-17
A chance reunion with a childhood friend sends a young woman reeling through the surreal taxonomy of her life.
Seven is 24 years old, works in the laundry room of a chiropractor’s office, and still lives at home with her mother and grandmother. Her days consist of a monotony measured in repeated sensation: the “pigskin” texture of the thin towels, the “symphonic” sound of the chiropractor’s urine stream in the laundry room toilet, the jellylike residue of the soap dispenser that “dribbl[es] like a nosebleed” and must be wiped clean every hour. At home, Seven follows similarly long-established rituals, watching television with her mother and her grandmother in the “apartment [they have] been renting since before [she] was born.” Though her mother encourages her to move out on her own someday, there seems to be nothing that could shake Seven from this cycle—which serves to forestall the vision of a girl’s future her grandmother once presented to her: “You’re born. You leave your family before it can eat you. You are eaten by another family and give birth to its children. You make your life a service to others, and in exchange you are never alone with your desires.” Then, while cleaning one of the chiropractor’s treatment rooms, Seven comes face-to-face with Cecilia, a beloved childhood friend and subject of Seven’s most closely guarded fantasies. Cecilia’s reemergence in Seven’s life instigates a flurry of uncontrolled memory wherein the girls’ shared experiments with forbidden sensuality express themselves in Seven’s desire to consume Cecilia’s very being, to enshroud her beloved in the cavities of her body, to become her—if not in this life, then perhaps in the next. An erotic, dissociative exploration of obsession, this slender novella reconfigures desire as a corporeal function as integral as breathing or digestion. While the visceral, disorienting nature of the language sometimes obscures the images themselves, the work of reading this book leaves the reader with the same feeling one has after eating a particularly indulgent meal—satiation, with the knowledge of more hunger to come.
A truly unique voice.
