Publishers Weekly
★ 06/12/2023
Chang (Days of Distraction) explores the meaning of home in her powerful and delightfully strange debut collection. After the 30-something narrator of “Unknown by Unknown” loses her job to a more efficient software program, she takes a month-long house-sitting gig in a luxurious Northern California home. There, she lies out on the deck as “flat and still as a corpse in a bikini” and imagines herself “slowly cooking like an animal on a spit.... as though I were dissolving.... Occasionally, the sensation frightened me, but most of the time I was relieved.” The elegant and compressed “Li Fan” starts with the death of a woman named Mrs. Shum from a stroke, then tells of how she came to live in a rundown boardinghouse and collect bottles and cans. The residents of the neighborhood where she picks up the redeemables call her “the Asian recycling lady,” but they don’t know she used to have a home there with her husband, that they came from Wuhan, and that she once nurtured dreams of a career in government. In “A Visit,” a young woman reconnects with her peripatetic father after he travels from Northern California to see her in Upstate New York. It takes getting up close to recognize him; at first, all she sees are the “curves and juts of a skull... beneath weathered skin.” Chang’s distinctive style and wry tone bring her characters to startling life, all the while rendering the pain of their loneliness and desire for stability in stark relief. This is a triumph. Agent: Alexa Stark, Writers House. (Aug.)
From the Publisher
Alexandra Chang is a riveting and exciting presence in our literature. Her stories are honest, insightful, bold, and full of heart.” — George Saunders, author of Liberation Day
“Haunting and mesmerizing; it’s only after you finish reading Alexandra Chang's Tomb Sweeping that you realize there were so many gaps in you that her stories were destined to fill. A marvelous collection.” — Jason Mott, National Book Award–winning author of Hell of a Book
"Chang writes deftly about the wonder and volatility of becoming. In Tomb Sweeping, family (or lineage) is a matter of both predestiny and aberration." — Raven Leilani, author of Luster
“Following her phenomenal debut novel, Days of Distraction, Chang returns with Tomb Sweeping, a collection of inventive, affecting, and delightfully strange stories featuring humble characters across China and the US who navigate daily disappointments, work mundanities, and unlikely encounters. Whether set in rundown homes or an illegal gambling den, these stories reveal the high stakes of even the smallest personal dramas, and the ways we seek out comfort as we go through them.” — Bustle
“Compelling and compulsively readable, Tomb Sweeping reveals that Chang is a writer who’s only just beginning to show readers her impressive range. Subtle wisdom runs rampant through these pages.” — San Francisco Chronicle
“Chang (Days of Distraction) explores the meaning of home in her powerful and delightfully strange debut collection. . . . Chang’s distinctive style and wry tone bring her characters to startling life, all the while rendering the pain of their loneliness and desire for stability in stark relief. This is a triumph.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Arresting. . . Chang’s sharp observations again transform her fiction into bitingly acute truths.” — Terry Hong
“Alexandra Chang’s stories reveal humanity through the mundane. As the title of the collection suggests, Tomb Sweeping is a nod to forbears, a meditation of our estranged ancestors, faults and all, who have stumbled before us.” — Northwest Review
“Some stories are funny, some are more poignant, others bizarre, and many are a delightful combination. Read after getting that flight confirmation email.” — Read Reciepts
“Riveting. . . . These stories examine the dream of wealth and success, as characters wrestle with conflicting desires of connection and independence.” — Washington Post
“A haunting exploration of relationships that examines the deep bonds and disappointments of family and modern life…. [Chang’s] deft skills are coupled with a fearlessness in investigating the awkward and uncomfortable spaces between people…. Within these pages there is also humor and love.” — Shondaland
“Each of these pieces offers a hint of humor and a dose (small or large) of haunt. . . .Each story investigates and celebrates the question of knowing, just like the tomb-sweeping holiday does. For what do we really know? And how can we ever know? Chang’s genius is in the gaps that leave us pondering.” — Book Report Network
“The best of Chang’s stories possess an unsentimental, fable-like quietude...wherein the strangeness of relationships, particularly familial bonds, are scrutinized through a lens of equally strange, rose-tinted nihilism. Other stories by Chang resemble, in their handling of dialogue and power, the works of American literary cult figure Jane Bowles. . . . Chang’s characters, armed with college degrees in rhetoric and razor-sharp self-awareness, are as difficult as they are endearing. . . . The accelerated present Chang offers helps us see where fever dreams might lead, or at least that we’re not alone in having them.” — The Millions
SEPTEMBER 2023 -- AudioFile
Hannah Choi generally does a fine job with this collection of short stories, but she has some minor trouble with several of the male voices. Most of the major characters are Chinese or of Chinese ancestry, and Chinese immigrant culture is an important factor--but listeners won't need to have that background to understand and sympathize with the problems the characters face. Although they are often shaped by culture, the problems are human problems, and Choi inhabits the people facing them, even when some of those people are not entirely sympathetic. Many of the stories do not have simplistic conclusions, but they are still eminently satisfying. D.M.H. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
2023-05-24
The author of Days of Distraction (2020) explores timeless themes in short fiction.
Unemployed after being replaced by a piece of software, a woman in her 30s is burning through her severance pay, spending her days eating weed gummies and binge-watching dating shows. When a former co-worker steers a housesitting gig her way, she finds the idea of an “escape into someone else’s house, someone else’s life” attractive. This job takes her to a secluded home in the hills owned by a couple embarking on a trip to Portugal. Our narrator is free to enjoy the home’s amenities—meditation room, swimming pool, Peloton, professional espresso machine—as long as she agrees to stay out of the wife’s painting studio and a dilapidated shed. Despite the contemporary details, this is a perfect setup for a gothic tale, and Chang delivers a story in which the unexplained takes on the power to chill because of how it occurs within the quotidian abnormality of extreme privilege. This story, “Unknown by Unknown,” is the first in the collection, and it is far and away the best. The title story is also very good. In it, a series of rituals meant to honor ancestors forces a young girl to reckon with a massacre that occurred long before she was born—a massacre that her now-dead grandfather had tried to make her understand. The rest of the stories presented here are substantially less satisfying. Chang’s debut novel was brilliantly executed. Most of the works we see here feel like warm-up exercises or not entirely successful experiments. The author seems to have a particular aversion to—or difficulty with—endings. The openness at the end of “Unknown by Unknown” feels both scary and weirdly thrilling. Elsewhere, though, stories end at a moment that is maybe supposed to seem portentous but comes across as arbitrary.
An uneven collection from an exciting young author.
