Metabolizing the World Into Something Wild and Achingly Alive
GODS OF WANT: Stories, by K-Ming Chang Where novels are often described as ambitious, and omnivorous, short stories are rarely presumed to have appetites — to run rampant through the reader’s mind, ravenous, devouring, feral.
The most common metaphors that try to sum up the particular work a short story can do are postcards and photo albums, icebergs and carefully etched cameos: still, patient objects putting themselves on calm display.
Perhaps that’s why the fierce little machines found in the Taiwanese American writer K-Ming Chang’s first collection, “Gods of Want” — the successor to her gutsy debut novel, “Bestiary” — feel so unexpected: Each one is possessed of a powerful hunger, a drive to metabolize the recognizable features of a familiar world and transform them into something wilder, and achingly alive.
Within these stories, obsessed with the vagaries of emigration and adolescence and populated by ghosts and spirits, the stiff, regimented structures of life in America dissolve into a slipstream of folkloric myth.
