Social (ká-sióng 4)

Book 4 of Strangers Press' ká-sióng chapbook series.

A woman has fallen off the roof of her house in what was either a drunken accident or an attempted suicide and now lies in a coma. Over the course of the next seven days, the unnamed narrator watches over her while tracking the comments the incident has attracted online.

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ká-sióng, from the Taiwanese romanisation of 假想, which means make-believe, imagine, hypothesise – derived from 假 'ká' meaning 'false' and 想 'sióng' meaning 'thinking', so 'false thinking' / imagination / hypothesis.

The perfect pick-me-up for the literary curious, each carefully selected story is full of piercing insight and intrigue. We have local MPs facing PR disasters in the midst of a wave of social outrage; boy meets girl in a rooftop life pact; a chilling, gothic fable in which the narrator is bitten by a mountain rat before a troubling sickness takes hold; a dystopian future in which people are paid handsomely to remove negative emotions; and gossip surrounding a woman who has fallen into a coma as an unnamed narrator watches over her and tracks the comments the incident has attracted online.

ká-sióng was made possible through generous funding from the Ministry of Culture, Taiwan; National Museum of Taiwan Literature; and Literature from Taiwan.