The science fiction and fantasy books in June are something special

Fox spirits are having a big moment in literature right now, as seen in Yangsze Choo’s The Fox Wife. In Asian cultures, these mischievous shapeshifters are revered but also seen as avatars of tantalizing deception. Ninetails, a new collection of nine fox-themed short stories, plays beautifully with this dichotomy.

Sally Wen Mao has received much praise for her poetry, but Ninetails is her first work of fiction—and it not only plays with language and imagery, but also injects a surreal, poetic logic into the narrative itself. Some of these stories feature fox spirits as a motif, while in others, foxes are the main characters. What unites them all is the focus on women trying to make sense of a world that makes unreasonable demands while projecting various archetypes onto them.

Mao sets the tone with a story about a sentient “love doll” whose wealthy owner likes to dismember his toys, and follows it with other stories about women in unbearable situations, including a continuing series of vignettes about Chinese immigrants trying to get to San Francisco in the early 20th century. When a woman cries, flies come out of her eyes instead of tears; a young girl is accused of causing a plague that makes boys’ penises disappear. These stories revolve around fertility and sexuality, seduction and anger, and the final tales strive for some kind of communal transformation or redemption.

Often, even a great collection fades into undifferentiated monotony by the time you finish it—but each of the indispensable stories in Ninetails remains fresh and distinctive long after you’ve closed the pages.