A fox spirit avenges a teen girl by seducing her abuser. A shapeshifting woman finds herself chased through the woods by fox hunters; meanwhile, an assassination plot called Operation Fox Hunt unfolds against the last Queen of Korea. Chinese migrants hoping to make new lives as ‘paper children’ in America find their pasts-and their hopes for the future-embodied in the foxes that haunt the harbor in 1900s Angel Island. In the nine tales of Ninetails, acclaimed poet Sally Wen Mao reimagines the fox spirit from Asian folklore-a shapeshifter, shaman, and seductress-as an icon of vengeance, solidarity and liberation. The characters of her stories are varied-from silicone sex dolls who come to life with new purpose, to women whose crushes manifest as stones-but they all reach for a common purpose: to find truth and belonging in a difficult world determined to consider them alien. With the fabulist vibrancy of Carmen Maria Machado, the sinuous world-building of Helen Oyeyemi, and the sensuous feminist rage of Han Kang, Ninetails is both timeless-unearthing a cultural icon whose origins date back over a thousand years-and timely in its contemporary political urgency.
