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Vendor
Liepman Literary Agency
Marc Koralnik
Original language
English

LESSER KNOWN MONSTERS OF THE 21st CENTUR

Kim Fu

In the twelve unforgettable tales of Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century, the strange is made familiar and the familiar strange, such that a girl growing wings on her legs feels like an ordinary rite of passage, while a bug-infested house becomes an impossible, Kafkaesque nightmare. Each story builds a new world all its own: A group of children steal a haunted doll; a runaway bride encounters a sea monster; a vendor sells toy boxes that seemingly control the passage of time; an insomniac is seduced by the Sandman. These visions of modern life wrestle with themes of death and technological consequence, guilt and sexuality, as they unmask the contradictions that exist within all of us.
Mesmerizing, electric, and wholly original, Kim Fu's Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century blurs the boundaries of the real and fantastic, offering intricate and surprising insights into human nature.

KIM FU is the author of For Today I Am a Boy, which won the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award, as well as a New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice. Her second novel, The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore, was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award and the OLA Evergreen Award.
Fu's writing has appeared in Granta, The Atlantic, The New York Times, Hazlitt, and the Times Literary Supplement. She lives in Seattle, WA.
Available products
Book

Published 2022-02-01 by Coach House Books

Comments

Tin House (Winter 2022)

Was shortlisted for the 2022 Scotiabank Giller Prize, the highest literary award for Canadian fiction. Here's what the jury had to say: “An endlessly surprising story collection without a single flawed entry in the bunch, Kim Fu's Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century is brilliantly textured. Moving from an argument with the operator of a VR machine to an insomniac's encounter with a veritable sandman to a couple who can die and resurrect themselves at will, Fu's worlds are fantastical and enterprising in their own right. But these set-ups stealthily reveal themselves to be structures for unspeakably moving revelations about the most real of human experiences – grief, anger, mistrust, sex, nostalgia, sacrifice. A deeply emotional collection that delights, dares, and dazzles.”

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