In this debut story collection, Ysabelle Cheung weaves an eerie fabulism with tales that cross continents, technology, and time.
Set in Hong Kong and America-between the present day and an uncannily altered future-this story collection warps the familiar rules of our world to ask: what does it mean to be Asian and a woman-living under the specter of state and technological surveillance-or trying to break free from it?
In the title story, a young woman of color realizes she can make her fortune by surgically selling her facial features to whiter, wealthier clients. In "Please, Get Out and Dance," a group of rebels escapes a city that is literally disappearing around them-building by building, person by person-to migrate to a new home beneath the ocean, defying their government's mandate. "Herbs" follows an elderly widow who, when the clones of her dead husband start to appear uninvited in her home, must grapple with her memories.
In each of these stories, Cheung tilts the world just slightly off its axis to bring together a haunting meditation on what it means to survive within our increasingly digitized and mechanized world.
Table of Contents:
- Mycomorphosis
- Please, Get Out and Dance
- To My Great-Granddaughter, Who Will Find This Letter When I Am Dead
- The Reader
- Find Your Spirit
- The Patchwork Dolls
- Galatea
- Herbs
- The In-Between
- Not in This Neighborhood
About the Author :
Ysabelle Cheung's fiction, including stories from this collection, has appeared in or is forthcoming from Granta, The Rumpus, Joyland, and Slate. The story "Please, Get Out and Dance," published in The Margins (Asian American Writers Workshop), was nominated for the 2022 Pushcart Prize. Her essays and cultural criticism have appeared in The Atlantic, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Artforum, and Lithub, among others. She holds a BA in English Literature and Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. She lives in Hong Kong.
Review :
“What elevates many of Cheung’s stories into standouts is her uncanny ability effortlessly to spin today’s all-too-familiar challenges into tomorrow's speculative extremes: the jarring disappearance of books; escaping colonialism's destruction; matched cohabitation instead of dating; interplanetary immigration. With inventive aplomb, Cheung skillfully strikes a memorable balance between the utterly disconcerting and thoroughly engaging.”—STARRED review, Shelf Awareness
“Cheung's debut collection is a kaleidoscope, vibrant and surreal; turn it one way, and watch the world change in unbelievable color...An eerie yet whimsical short story collection for fans of magical realism.”—Booklist
“Ysabelle Cheung debuts with a formally adventurous, emotionally prismatic constellation of stories, each one a small aperture into vividly imagined worlds, which are just a degree off from our own reality. Here, the speculative is no escape, but a sharp lens interrogating the sleek fictions of technology and digital advancement. Populated by women who understand intimately that they’re occupying realities where power is ambient, identity is editable, and connection is viewed as a puzzle to be engineered, Patchwork Dolls is thrillingly contemplative, perfect for any reader who has ever suspected that the future is already here—and that its most urgent questions are not technological, but moral.”—Jemimah Wei, The Original Daughter
“Ysabelle Cheung's protagonists grapple with intimacies of power from the personal to the political to the changing natural world. Yet, what draws me to these stories is not only their relevance, but their intelligent dedication to accuracy of individual feeling, no matter what the form, device, or imagination required. In other words, while these stories are set in various times, Cheung does not shy away from the present. Neither science fiction, myth, nor magical realism, but some amalgamation of it all, this collection offers fugitive possibilities against the hauntings of our historical moment.”—Yanyi, Dream of the Divided Field
“With grace and precision, Ysabelle Cheung conjures up uncanny worlds populated by clones and spirits, fungi and liminal spaces, to interrogate migration, alienation, and inheritance. It is a magical realism that illuminates as much as it disorientates, and one that covers a full spectrum of human emotions resting underneath a glaze of unreality. A startling debut with evocative haunting tales that evoke Angela Carter, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Carmen Maria Machado; I devoured this book in one sitting.”—Karen Cheung, Impossible City
“In Ysabelle Cheung’s singular collection, women surgically swap their facial features for much-needed funds, sweeping generational histories radiate from simple recipes, and ghosts arrive on the page, as common as household objects. Wildly inventive and achingly prophetic, Patchwork Dolls grabs you by the throat with its depiction of our destabilizing time and refuses to unclench. An arresting tale of erasure, exile, and emotional resilience, this is an exquisite debut.”—Megan Kamalei Kakimoto, author of Every Drop Is a Man’s Nightmare
