Gods of Want : Startling first collection of short stories from a rising talent

An electrifying book of stories by young Taiwanese American writer K-Ming Chang. This collection has all the startling and subversive energy that pulled us into Bestiary - K-Ming's voice and style are so recognisably her own - and it's exciting to see the pertinent themes of body, queerness and family explored here with an even broader lens and a seemingly boundless, dark imagination. In Anchor Baby, a girl wrestles with the growing debt that her birth (and US birth certificate) have cost her family. In Xifu (Daughter-in-law), a mother makes it her mission to get her daughter-in-law into trouble in her son's eyes, ludicrously faking her own deaths. In Dykes, a girl falls in love with her co-worker at a Las Vegas sushi restaurant, but fears she has disappeared when the desert city floods. In Aborigines, a daughter is sent to live with her aunts on an island haunted by soldier-ghosts, exploding whales and stray dogs, until her mother calls her back to California again. In the eponymous story Resident Aliens, a girl describes the series of widows to have rented her family's windowless basement, such as the one who taught her how to tie knots and get out of them, or the one she was in love with who left to become a nun. For its thematic and atmospheric intensity, how K-Ming contrasts the corporeal and nightmarish, and explores family entanglement, body politics and sexuality, I think Resident Aliens would appeal to fans of Donald Ray Pollock's Knockemstiff , Daisy Johnson's Fen, Carmen Maria Machado's Her Body and Other Parties and Roxane Gay's Difficult Women.