Hopeful Monsters [Paperback]

In science "hopeful monsters" are genetic mutants that adapt themselves to changing environments, and are often the bridge between species. In Hiromi Goto's collection of stories, hopeful monsters are characters trapped between generations and cultures, desperately seeking to evolve, to escape their lives and even themselves. A woman gives birth to a baby with a tail and is forced to re-examine her relationship with her mother and confront her past. Three generations of women spend a night around a kitchen table, describing how their dreams turn into nightmares. A young woman tries to understand humanity and her own experiences by immersing herself in mall life. They all know they're out of place, but they don't know where to go. There's no sanctuary for them, no domestic or cultural space where they can blend in and lead normal lives. The past is a strange land and the future an alien one.

But Hopeful Monsters isn't simply another catalog of cultural disconnections and domestic crises. Instead, its characters find secret paths through the foreign landscapes of their lives, paths that lead to moments of, if not understanding, then at least recognition, and perhaps even reconciliation. The characters' journeys are mirrored in Goto's narrative style. The stories are loose, full of gaps and jarring disjunctions, but at the same time are marked by a poet's attention to language and the ability to find beauty and solace in the strange and unknowable. They end not with resolution or closure, but with the opening of possibilities, of a shift from one life to another, from dream to reality. Hopeful Monsters carries the genetic material of recognizable genres--coming-of-age story, immigrant narrative, feminist text--but it defies categorization. It's a hybrid entity for a hybrid time. --Peter Darbyshire

These are stories that, without resorting to too much supernatural trickery, truly deliver both a disturbing frisson and a psychological punch.
—Quill & Quire (Quill & Quire )

Stunning, like small diamonds adorning a beautiful hand. The stories' often weird endings take Margaret Atwood's technological fictions several steps closer to the macabre into a sort of "Twilight Zone" of postmodern family life that mostly features postfeminist women at their fickle witchiest.
—The Multicultural Review (Multicultural Review )

The stories are loose, full of gaps and jarring disjunctions, but at the same time are marked by a poet's attention to language and the ability to find beauty and solace in the strange and unknowable. Hopeful Monsters carries the genetic material of recognizable genres--coming-of-age story, immigrant narrative, feminist text--but it defies categorization. It's a hybrid entity for a hybrid time.
—amazon.ca (amazon.ca )

If you loved Geek Love by Katherine Dunn, you'll love this book...
—The Calgary Herald (Calgary Herald )

The writing is sleek in its economy but pointed in its observation. Yet often a metaphor will bloom into something sublimely sensual. Goto knows how to take her characters into hard places. You won't like all of them—but you won't want to leave them alone. Gorgeous.
—Now Magazine (NOW Magazine )

The unbearable voices of mythic manatees, the cry of the phoenix, the whispers of kappa lovers beside a gurgling stream. The voice of the moon that is ever turned away from our gaze, the song of suns colliding. The sounds which permeate from my skin on such a level of intensity that mortal senses recoil, deflect beauty into ugliness as a way of coping. And my joy. Such incredible joy. The hairs on my arms stand electric, the static energy and the heat amplifies my smell/sound with such exponential dizzying intensity, that the plastic which surrounds me bursts apart, falls away from my being like an artificial cocoon.
I hover, twenty feet in the air.

The title of Hopeful Monsters refers to genetically abnormal organisms that naturally adapt to their environments. In Hiromi Goto's quietly devastating stories, the hopeful monsters in question are women confounded by familial duty and the ghosts of their past.

As mothers, daughters, wives, and "stinky girls," they are the walking wounded—a mother terrified by a newborn daughter who bears a tail; a woman who cannot breast-feed without pain; three generations of women who dream of lives that are not their own. But their wills are a force of nature unto themselves, and their struggles for selfhood are imbued with the light of myth and magic-realism. In these tales of domestic crises and cultural dissonance, Goto makes the familiar seem strange, and deciphers those moments when the idyllic skews into the absurd, the sublime, even the horrific.

Alternately poignant and noisy, these stories establish Hiromi Goto's gift for short fiction that is as shining as her acclaimed novels.

(arsenalpulp.com )

Welcoming Hiromi Goto to the Arsenal Pulp family is very exciting. It’s like having your long-lost cousin show up to your eighteenth birthday party and discovering you are exactly alike. And now, you get to show her off.

A lot can happen in a cousin or auntie’s life, and it might not be pretty. While some take their scrapes and call them unhealable wounds, these are not the ones Goto writes about. Goto describes the mothers, the grandfathers and the children that start out different, or end up strange but never gape at their otherness.

Goto’s characters are imbued with confidence and comforted by the magic of their alienness. Whether you believe that the hard things in life make you stronger, or people are just born that way, these Hopeful Monsters will impress you with their tenacity and their ability to bend Fate.

Hiromi Goto is the author of the story collection Hopeful Monsters (Arsenal Pulp Press) as well as the novels The Kappa Child and Chorus of Mushrooms, winner of the Commonwealth Writers Prize for First Book (Canada-Caribbean) and co-winner of the Canada-Japan Book Award, and the children's book The Water of Possibility, a selection of the Canadian Children's Book Centre. Her most recent novel is a YA fantasy, Half World and she's co-written a book of poetry with David Bateman entitled Wait Until Late Afternoon. She is the 2009/10 writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta.

The unbearable voices of mythic manatees, the cry of the phoenix, the whispers of kappa lovers beside a gurgling stream. The voice of the moon that is ever turned away from our gaze, the song of suns colliding. The sounds which permeate from my skin on such a level of intensity that mortal senses recoil, deflect beauty into ugliness as a way of coping. And my joy. Such incredible joy. The hairs on my arms stand electric, the static energy and the heat amplifies my smell/sound with such exponential dizzying intensity, that the plastic which surrounds me bursts apart, falls away from my being like an artificial cocoon. I hover, twenty feet in the air. from “Stinky Girl”