Fiction. Winner of a 2009 PEN/Beyond Margins Award. At once a fairy tale, a fortune, and a translation told through the I Ching, Vietnamese-American author Lily Hoang's CHANGING is a ghostly and miniature novel. Both mysterious and lucid at once, the book follows Little Girl down a century-old path into her family's story. Changing is Little Girl's fate, and in CHANGING she finds an unsettling, beautiful home. Like a topsy-turvy horoscope writer, Hoang weaves a modern novella into the classical form of the I Ching. In glassine sentences, fragmented and new, Jack and Jill fall down the hill over and over again in intricate and ancient patterns. Here is a wonder story for 21st century America. Here is a calligraphic patchwork of sadness. "This is an impossible thing, a dream object"--Joyelle McSweeney, author of FLET.
About the author: Lily Hoang's first book, PARABOLA, won the Chiasmus Press Un-Doing the Novel Contest. She is also the author of the novel CHANGING (Fairy Tale Review Press, 2008) and the forthcoming novel THE EVOLUTIONARY REVOLUTION (Les Figues Press, 2010). She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of English & Women's Studies at Saint Mary's College in Indiana.
Reviews:
http://htmlgiant.com/?p=4261
http://trevordodge.com/?p=2442
http://community.livejournal.com/asianamlitfans/46821.html
http://wwbi.wordpress.com/2009/02/23/lily-hoangs-changing/
http://www.pen.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/3706/prmID/1496
http://lilysvirtualpad.blogspot.com/
http://www.thecollagist.com/archive/September2009/Madera/index.html