When Fox Is a Thousand is a lyrical, magical story, a spirited retelling of the old Chinese folktale of the Fox. In Larissa Lai's compelling first novel, a fox spirit comes to haunt the oddly named Artemis Wong, a young woman living in Vancouver. The fox brings with her the history of another haunting, that of the T'ang Dynasty poet Yu Hsuan-Chi, who was accused, perhaps wrongly, of having murdered the young maid servant who once worked for her.

One part history, one part fairytale, one part urban discontent, this delightful novel cracks open all preconceptions of Asian women, gender, sexuality, family, faith, and the flow of time. Smart, funny, and fully imagined, When Fox Is a Thousand is beautiful, enchanting, and composed with a sure narrative hand. Lai's potent imagination and considerable verbal skill result in a tale that continues to haunt long after the story is told.

First published to wide acclaim in 1995 (a finalist for the Chapters/Books in Canada First Novel Award) and out of print since 2001, this new edition of When Fox Is a Thousand, published by Arsenal Pulp Press for the first time, features a new afterword by the author.

Larissa Lai is the author of two novels, When Fox is a Thousand, shortlisted for the Books in Canada First Novel Award, and Salt Fish Girl, shortlisted for the Tiptree Award, the Sunburst Award and the City of Calgary W.O. Mitchell Award; one book of poetry Automaton Biographies, shortlisted for the Dorothy Livesay Award; and a chapbook, Eggs in the Basement, shortlisted for the bp Nichol Chapbook Award.

Through the 90s, she was a cultural organizer in feminist, GLBTQ and anti-racist communities in Vancouver. Now, as an English professor at the University of British Columbia, she teaches courses on race, memory, and citizenship, as well as on biopower and the poetics of relation.

Rita Wong teaches in Critical + Cultural Studies at the Emily Carr University of Art + Design, Vancouver, BC, Canada, where she has developed a humanities course focused on water, with the support of a fellowship from the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society. She is currently researching the poetics of water, supported by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada: http://downstream.ecuad.ca/ .

Her poems have appeared in anthologies such as Prismatic Publics: Innovative Canadian Women's Poetry and Poetics, Regreen: New Canadian Ecological Poetry, Visions of British Columbia (published for an exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery), and Making a Difference: Canadian Multicultural Literature. She has a passion for daylighting buried urban streams and for watershed literacy. Wong can be found on twitter at https://twitter.com/rrrwong.

Larissa Lai's profile page

A particularly acute pleasure.
-The Advocate

Majestically written, with wild but contained imagery.
-Vancouver Sun

A sure-footed writer and teller of tales, Lai takes the reader on a magnificent journey through layers of time, myth, and imagery.
-Susan Crean

A magical book . . . Lai moves with a sure hand . . . her potent imagination and considerable verbal skill result in a tale that continues to haunt long after the book is closed.
-Books in Canada