Nancy Auâs debut collection is rich with scents, sounds, imaginative leaps, and unexpected angles of vision. These seventeen stories present the challenges facing characters whose inner and outer lives often do not align, whose spirits attempt flight despite dashed hopes and lean circumstances. Marginalized by race, age, and sexuality, they endeavor to create new worlds that honor their identities and their Chinese heritage.
Au excels at inhabiting the minds and hearts of children and the elderly. In the title story, Sophie Chu dresses daily in her increasingly shabby elephant costume to ensure her missing parents recognize her upon their return. In âThe Unfed,â a village elder seeks to revive, with her dimming magic, a mountain community struck by tragedy. âLouiseâ follows, with deceptive hilarity (involving a one-eyed duck), the nuanced give and take between May Zhou and Lai, dissimilar yet passionate partners considering parenthood. The volume also offers sparkling speculative work that taps into the strength of natureâ"fox spirits and fire beetles, swollen rivers and rippling cloudsâ"to showcase the sometimes surreal transformations of Auâs protagonists.
Spider Love Song and Other Stories treads the fault line that forms between lovers, families, friends, culturesâ"exposing injuries and vulnerabilities, but also the strength and courage necessary to recast resentment and anger into wonder and power. Auâs lyrical style, humor, and tender attention to her charactersâ fancies and failings make this powerful debut a delight to read.
Industry Reviews
"Spider Love Song and Other Stories is an eclectic mixture of distinctive characters and offbeat plots. . . . Au blends a lyrical style. . . with more matter-of-fact prose. Her stories have a purely aesthetic draw, but even those that are shorter and more poetic work to incorporate interesting plot arcs. Some stories evince a more natural momentum than others, but they all lead the reader to new territory, often stopping on unexpected notes."-- "BookBrowse"
"If you listen carefully to Spider Love Song, you might find a place between hearing and imagination, invisibility and wonder. . ." -- "Lambda Literary"
"Foxes, turtles, ducks, oysters, fish, badgers, beetles, damselflies, bees: all manner of creatures scratch, swim, thrum, and shimmer through these tender and fantastic stories. Characters struggle with the entanglements of the living and the dead, like the 'spiders' webs [that] can wind around anything that doesn't pay attention, ' while they long to be out in the world that both compels and terrifies. I was spellbound by Au's unique vision and language that pay attention to the many wild, rich worlds that hold us."--Peg Alford Pursell, author of A Girl Goes into the Forest
"Nancy Au writes about badass women, women born as damselfly nymphs in China who become grounded, wingless, in America, mothers and daughters and grandmothers who are sex, who are power, who are sarcastic beasts, who are us. Spider Love Song and Other Stories is a collection like no other. Read it and marvel." --May-lee Chai, author of Useful Phrases for Immigrants: Stories and Dragon Chica: A Novel
"The lush and vibrant world of Nancy Au's Spider Love Song and Other Stories is teeming with somnambulist fathers, one-eyed duck children, dreams of an all Chinese American Atlantis, storytelling fox spirits, orphans seeking the cure for grief and more. Darkly funny at times and always profound, Au's imagination lends us magic to feel our way through what it means to be queer, Chinese American, indebted to our mothers and ancestors, and always longing for something more."--Muriel Leung, author of Bone Confetti
