Ninetails

Nine Tales

By: Sally Wen Mao

Narrated by: Nancy Wu, Annie Q, Jen Zhao, Eunice Wong

Length: 9 hrs and 9 mins

Publisher's summary

“A sumptuous and lively collection, leaping from story to story in much the same way a fox does—surprisingly, gracefully, and with impressive aim. I loved this book.”–Kelly Link, Pulitzer Prize finalist and bestselling author of Get in Trouble and The Book of Love

“What I love most about Ninetails is its fierce allegiance to underdogs of all kinds, its careful and myriad empathy for its characters, but also its pure and artisanal delight in language and fictive possibilities.”—Ocean Vuong, New York Times-bestselling author of On Earth, We're Briefly Gorgeous and Time is a Mother

A “lyrical and virtuosic” fabulist debut collection of stories re-imagining the nine-tailed fox spirit of Asian folklore (Gina Chung).

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.

©2024 Sally Wen Mao (P)2024 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

“With this first collection of deft and poignant stories, Sally Wen Mao continues to prove herself as one of the most fascinating and versatile writers of her generation.”—Dave Eggers, New York Times bestselling author of The Eyes & the Impossible and The Every

“From acclaimed poet Sally Wen Mao comes her first collection of short stories Ninetails, a fabulist retelling of the nine-tailed fox spirit of Asian folklore. From a fox spirit avenging a teen girl by seducing her abuser to an assassination plot against the Queen of Korea known as Operation Fox Hunt, each story glimmers with captivating premises and glistens with undeniable lyricism. Sally Wen Mao has built entire worlds in each short entry, making this a prose debut that you don’t want to miss.”—Chicago Review of Books

"Award-winning poet Mao’s fiction debut is a spectacularly multifaceted collection about women and their feral superpowers....Mao challenges and disrupts expectations of womanhood, demanding and forging brilliant new narratives.”—Booklist *starred review*