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.

Hiromi Goto is the award-winning author of many books for youth and adults. Her adult novel, Chorus of Mushrooms (1994) was the recipient of the regional Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book as well as co-winner of the Canada-Japan Book Award. Her second adult novel, The Kappa Child, was awarded the James Tiptree Jr. Award. Hopeful Monsters was her first collection of short stories and in 2009, she co-wrote, with David Bateman, her first book of poetry, Wait Until Late Afternoon. More recently her YA novel, Half World, was winner of the 2010 Sunburst Award and the Carl Brandon Parallax Award and was longlisted for the IMPAC-Dublin Literary Award. Her latest YA publication is Darkest Light. Hiromi is also a mentro at Simon Fraser University's The Writer's Studio, an editor, and monther of two grown children. She is at work on graphic novels and short stories.

In honour of its 20th anniversary, NeWest Press released a special edition of her seminal Chorus of Mushrooms in Spring 2014.

Hiromi Goto's profile page

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

Hopeful Monsters,a set of the novelist's sickly delicious short stories.
-Hour Magazine

Hour Magazine

Nature and civilized society are at odds in stories where anything, no matter how improbable to scientifically trained minds, can happen, and we believe every word of it. That we do is a testament to Goto's fine writing and confident tone. Hopeful Monsters is like the baby with the tail: weird and marvellous at the same time.
-The Georgia Straight

Georgia Straight

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

Hopeful Monsters is an invitation for us to reassess the "others" that we are so quick to sidestep in our daily lives--not simply the popularly denounced monsters, such as the sex offender, but also the smaller monsters, like the tyrannical boss, or the hostile neighbour.
-Popmatters.com

Popmatters.com

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

There is something odd, beautiful and often macabre in the tales of this Burnaby author.
-Monday Magazine

Monday Magazine

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 book dips like a diving rod into the nuances of tradition that separate and define generations.
-The Rain Review of Books

Rain Review

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

Calgary Herald

One of the most compelling features of this collection is Goto's capacity to, with great sensitivity, recreate amd revision the discourse around monsters and monster making.
-Swerve Magazine

Swerve Magazine