Meng Jin

From the acclaimed author of Little Gods, whose “gift merges science, politics and art: the kind of audacity our world needs now” (Gina Apostol), comes an immersive and electrifying story collection that explores self-construction, female resilience, and migrations both literal and transformative.

Meng Jin’s critically acclaimed debut novel, Little Gods, was praised as “spectacular and emotionally polyphonic (Omar El-Akkad, BookPage), “powerful” (Washington Post), and “meticulously observed, daringly imagined” (Claire Messud). Now Jin turns her considerable talents to short fiction, in ten thematically linked stories.

Written during the turbulent years of the Trump administration and the first year of the pandemic, these stories explore intimacy and isolation, coming-of-age and coming to terms with the repercussions of past mistakes, fraying relationships and surprising moments of connection. Moving between San Francisco and China, and from unsparing realism to genre-bending delight, Self-Portrait with Ghost considers what it means to live in an age of heightened self-consciousness, seemingly endless access to knowledge, and little actual power.

Page-turning, thought-provoking, and wholly unique, Self-Portrait with Ghost further establishes Meng Jin as a writer who “reminds us that possible explanations in our universe are as varied as the beings who populate it” (Paris Review).

Short Stories

Self-Portrait with Ghost

Lindsay

Phillip had been as good as dead to me, for no pernicious reason. Just— irrelevance. Now he’d been resurrected and killed, in one swift blow.

“Her suffering begins to appear”— Ling would not put it this way. For Ling, suffering is a tool, wielded by the human and the divine. The abstract manifests as concrete, the intangible as felt. Suffering can be hard like a slap or it can fester, like grit beneath the nail. Feeling hardens into form, allegory into event. Ling doesn’t need pigmentation to describe her grief. Her suffering has always been material.

Could a body belong to anyone, including oneself?

In these times I’ve grown tired of my heart, how much feeling it has required, and would much prefer to laugh. But there it is, thumping.

The future had been an open field then, opaque and blinding white; in the blindness a million paths waited to clarify into color and shape. She had not known enough to imagine what any one path might look like, or to understand that to take one might preclude your journey on another.

What was wrong with me? Why didn’t I want to be a witness to history, to any kind of time passing?

Self-Portrait with Ghost quotes

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