“I Feel Like I Can Create The Rules Of The World As I’m Writing It” — K-Ming Chang On The Stories in Her Phenomenal New Collection

In Gods of Want, K-Ming Chang has assembled an assortment of sly, challenging, and consistently surprising stories that will surely earn her the same level of critical acclaim as her debut novel, Bestiary. From a young woman whose new marriage to a storm-chaser is nearly upended by the ghosts of her dead cousins to the teenage girl who becomes so entranced with a model in a cigarette ad that the ad comes to life, each of these stories inventively plays with mythology while taking the reader to unexpected places. Indeed, the exhilarating stories of Gods of Want have already captured the attention of critics. The New York Times called Gods of Want “a voracious, probing collection, proof of how exhilarating the short story can be in the hands of a writer who, as one of her narrators puts it, ‘somehow … made every word sound like want,’” and Publishers Weekly noted that “Chang’s bold conceits and potent imagery evoke a raw, visceral power that captures feelings of deep longing and puts them into words.” Chang recently spoke with us about mythology, writing characters with an expanded sense of agency, and why she held her breath in the children’s section of her library.