A Year in Reading: K-Ming Chang

This year, while attempting to write a novella for the first time, I hungrily sought out short novels and novellas in translation. For the past two years, my reading life has shifted slowly and steadily toward fiction in translation, which has allowed me to joyfully rediscover and reconnect with the infinite possibilities of language, storytelling, and form.

I immersed myself in the short novels of Fleur Jaeggy, and in particular Sweet Days of Discipline and S.S. Proleterka, both of which astonished and captivated me. Particular lines from Sweet Days of Discipline continue to follow me, stark and gutting. Her writing is so precise and yet contains such a sense of mystery, and my goal in the coming year is to read as many books by her as possible, in whatever genre. Her writing reminds me to listen to memory, silence, and the unspoken.

While exploring the novella form for the first time, I kept a stack of novellas and short novels on my desk, an altar of sorts to the excitement and pleasure I experienced while reading them, and an aspirational reminder of what was possible. In this stack was La Bastarda by Trifonia Melibea Obono (for its queerness and stunning voice), Nowhere to be Found by Bae Suah (for its eerie strangeness and subterranean passion), Winter in Sochko and The Pachinko Parlor by Elisa Shua Dusapin (I found myself reading each of her sentences twice, because they contain so much subtlety and meaning), The Hole by Hiroko Oyamada (for its haunting, dreamlike quality), and The Skin Is the Elastic Covering That Encases the Entire Body by Bjørn Rasmussen (for its wild form and visceral queer desire).

Queer fiction in translation holds a particularly special place in my heart, and Solo Dance by Li Kotomi gripped me, gutted me, and made me want to sing at the top of a cliff. I was also so thrilled to read Call Me Cassandra by Marcial Gala, since his novel The Black Cathedral remains one of my most re-read books. It was beyond exciting to see how the novels differed in form and structure, but how the expansiveness and relentlessness of his writing shines in both. I will eagerly read anything that’s both queer and coming-of-age, and in a way, I wonder whether all queer stories are inherently a kind of coming-of-age.

Most recently, I read novels by Yūko Tsushima, including Territory of Light (which I wish I could retroactively add to my novella stack) and Woman Running in the Mountains. Woman Running in the Mountains was an unexpected page-turner for me, and even now I’m hounded by images and moments from it. I realize that whenever I’m most frustrated with a narrator, or whenever a narrator feels unshakeable, it’s because I see some hidden part of myself reflected in them. I’ve also been savoring When I Sing, Mountains Dance by Irene Solà, and I wish I could live forever inside its pages. It listens to the life and the voice inside of everything, from women to land to deer, and it resonates deeply with the folklore, myths, and communal storytelling that I grew up with. It’s a book that feels like a channel, a vessel, almost beyond the category of literature, and it feels reductive to call it a novel (or even a book).

At night, before I sleep, I’ve been haunting myself with The Milk of Dreams by Leonora Carrington, which speaks to our most playful, strange, and imaginative selves. I’ve also been eagerly watching the new Interview with the Vampire TV show, which has inspired me to dive into the series I haven’t returned to since I was 15 years old, when I read Anne Rice’s Prince Lestat for the first time after picking it up randomly in the aisle of a supermarket and becoming instantly enthralled. I read the series out of order the first time, which was very chaotic, and now I’m being much more diligent. Most recently, I finished The Vampire Lestat and The Queen of the Damned, and the unabashed lushness of the writing has reawakened my love and passion for vampire literature, the gothic genre, and queer monstrosity.

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K-Ming Chang is a Kundiman fellow, a Lambda Literary Award finalist, and a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree. She is the author of the novel Bestiary, which was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. Her most recent book is Gods of Want.

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