The Bookslinger app has been updated with a new story!
Today’s story comes from Look Who’s Morphing by Asian Australian writer Tom Cho, published by Arsenal Pulp Press. Look Who’s Morphing is a funny, fantastical, often outlandish collection of stories firmly grounded in popular culture. Often with his family, the book’s central character undergoes a series of startling physical transformations, shape-shifting through figures drawn from film and television, music and books, porn flicks and comics. He is Godzilla, a Muppet, a gay white male stud, and Whitney Houston’s bodyguard; the Fonz, a robot, the von Trapp family’s caretaker, a Ford Bronco 4×4—and in the book’s lavish climax, a one-hundred-foot-tall guitar-wielding rock star performing for an adoring troupe of fans in Tokyo.
Throughout the stories, there is a pervasive questioning of the nature of identity, whether cultural, racial, sexual, gender, or all of the above, and the way it is constructed in a world filled with the white noise of pop culture. Look Who’s Morphing is a stylish, highly entertaining literary debut in which nothing—not even one’s body—can be taken for granted.
