[ad_1]
Fox spirits are currently enjoying a surge in popularity in fiction, with books such as Yangze Zhu’s The Fox’s Wife. In Asian cultures, these mischievous shapeshifters are revered, but they are also seen as fascinating incarnations of deception. Ninetails, a new collection of nine short stories about foxes, beautifully illustrates this dichotomy.
Sally Wenmao has been widely acclaimed for her poetry, but “The Nine Tails” is her first work of fiction, and she not only plays with words and images, but also brings a surreal and poetic logic to the stories themselves. Some of these stories feature fox spirits, others feature foxes as central characters. What they have in common is their focus on women, projecting different archetypes, as they try to make sense of a world that makes unreasonable demands on them.
Mao sets the tone with a tale of a sentient “love doll” whose wealthy owner likes to rip her toys apart. Stories of women in intolerable situations follow, including a series of short stories about Chinese immigrants trying to get into San Francisco in the early 20th century. When a woman cries, flies come out of her eyes instead of tears. A teenage girl is accused of starting a plague that causes boys’ penises to disappear. These stories revolve around fertility and sexuality, seduction and anger, and the final one points to some kind of shared transformation or redemption.
Often, great short story collections blur into undifferentiated monotony after you’ve finished reading them, but each must-read story in “Ninetails” remains fresh and unique long after you’ve closed the pages.
[ad_2]
Source link
