About this Event
K-Ming Chang, author of Bestiary, Organ Meats, and Gods of Want, visits the store for her new novel Needlemouth, in which three cousins are forced to complete an impossible and violent task set by a vengeful demon. She'll be joined by poet Gabrielle Bates.
Registration is not required, but helps us anticipate audience size.
Cousins Cindy, Yangyang, and Mandy’s hot, tedious summer unfolds in their grandmother’s hauntingly familiar house. Mandy, the eldest, seeks connection online and exchanges emails with a stranger. Yangyang, the youngest, retreats into her own imagination in search of meaning. But every morning Cindy wakes with strange objects in her mouth: a button, a berry, a coin.
One night, a starved figure with a mouth the size of a needle-tip appears at Cindy’s bedside. She is hunger-afflicted, a demon with no descendants to feed from: she is Needlemouth. Part vampire, part hungry ghost, Needlemouth forces the girls into a grim task to end a man’s life.
Cindy, Yangyang, and Mindy are plunged in and out of the demon realm, where they are called to break out of the indifference and numbness of their claustrophobic worlds, and where they are met with the most rageful and resistant parts of themselves. In a quest to satisfy the demon’s hunger, they unravel their shared grief and reckon with the cyclical violence that shaped their family. For readers of Akwaeke Emezi and Carmen Maria Machado, K-Ming Chang has crafted a reimagined coming of age novel that asks: what does it mean to become the monster instead of slaying it?
K-Ming Chang is a Lambda Literary Award winner, a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree, and an O. Henry Prize winner. She is the author of Bestiary, Gods of Want, Organ Meats, and a novella titled Cecilia. She has been longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, and the Otherwise Award.
Gabrielle Bates's poems have appeared in the New Yorker, the Believer, Ploughshares, Poetry Magazine, Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, and Sewanee Review. Her debut collection Judas Goat (Tin House, 2023) was named a Best Book of 2023 by NPR and Electric Lit and a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. Originally from Alabama, she is currently based in Seattle, where she works for Open Books: A Poem Emporium, co-hosts the podcast The Poet Salon, and serves occasionally as visiting faculty for the University of Washington Rome Center, the Rainier Writing Workshop Low-Residency MFA, and the Tin House Writers' Workshops. www.gabriellebat.es | On IG: @gabrielle_bates_
Event venue & nearby stays
The Elliott Bay Book Company, 1521 10th Avenue, Seattle, United States
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