In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward , Lauren Groff , Bret Easton Ellis , Celeste Ng , T.C. Boyle , Dana Spiotta , Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender , Roxane Gay, and many others.
Sally Wen Mao’s Ninetails is a truly epic collection of fables drawn from East Asian folklore that span centuries.
Booklist wrote of the book:
“Award-winning poet Mao’s fiction debut is a spectacularly multifaceted collection about women and their feral superpowers….Mao challenges and disrupts expectations of womanhood, demanding and forging brilliant new narratives.”
In her own words, here is Sally Wen Mao’s Book Notes music playlist for her debut story collection Ninetails :
In numerology and throughout many cultures, nine is a significant number, denoting near-completion, the sign of the end of a cycle or a season. There are nine planets in our solar system (Pluto counting). There are nine muses in Greek myth. There are the nine-headed phoenix and the nine-tailed fox, divine monsters of Chinese folklore. In ancient Chinese literature, the “Nine Songs” are the Songs of Chu, an ancient set of poems addressed to Gods and divinities.
Here, I am identifying nine songs to accompany my debut book of fiction, Ninetails: Nine Tales, a collection of nine tales whose threads unravel around the nine-tailed fox spirit, a shapeshifting, seductive creature from Chinese and East Asian folklore that spans thousands of years. For almost nine years, I followed the path of the fox spirit or hulijing, discovering its contradictions, movements, tendencies, dreams, and marvels. I discovered that the fox spirit is no ordinary mythic beast—it’s a creature whose inventors underestimated its powers to endure and survive thousands of years, subverting the will of those Chinese scholars who used it as an emblem of male anxiety toward femininity. Ninetails includes nine stories that I hope will bring the fox spirit into our present discourses and offer us a new emblem of hope and freedom. I hope the following songs encapsulate the sense of power, wonder, and dreamwork that the fox spirit has inspired in me as I wrote Ninetails , and I hope you can listen as you read Ninetails, out from Penguin Books on May 28 th .
“I Put A Spell on You” by Nina Simone: “Turtle Head Syndrome”
To me, this song, a true classic—a Piscean siren song by one of the absolute greatest, Nina Simone—captures the spirit of Ninetails, and the foxes and women inside it. Fox spirits seduce their lovers by taking the shape of a beautiful woman. They cast spells on their lovers, they entrap and delight them. They are capable of falling for their prey, but at the same time, they need the essence of humans in order to cultivate themselves toward immortality and transcendence. That teetering between seduction and possession, that tension between power and desperation (the man in this song is not under the singer’s spell, but she will place all her will on it until she has nothing left). In my story “Turtle Head Syndrome,” a boy does fall under the spell of a badly bullied classmate who is rumored to be a fox spirit, but the spell does not have the expected effect.
“The Olive Tree” [ 橄榄树 ] by Chyi Yu: “The Haunting of Angel Island”
My mother used to sing this song to me when I was a child, in the early days of us immigrating to the US, in the 90s. It feels wired to my brain—all my life the melancholic sweep of this song, its epic scope, has haunted me. The song opens with the refrain: “Don’t ask me where I’m from/ My hometown is far away/ Why do I wander/ Wandering afar, wandering.” It is a migration song. “The Olive Tree” was written by the Taiwanese writer Sanmao, an intrepid wanderer who wrote the seminal book Stories of the Sahara. The song was originally written about Sanmao’s time spent in Spain and her encounters with daily life there—the ultimate diaspora song. As such, I find that it captures the wandering spirit of the novella at the center of my book, “The Haunting of Angel Island,” a tale within the nine tales that has been spliced into nine stories. “The Haunting of Angel Island” follows nine different stories of women who have passed through the Angel Island Immigration Station in the 1910s. The station was built to detain immigrants from all over the world, especially the Chinese migrants most affected by the Chinese Exclusion Laws. Each of the characters in my story is haunted by a past that must be abandoned. To enter America as migrants and survive, they need to assume new identities—new names, new stories, new lives. The lyric “Don’t ask me where I’m from/I come from far away” truly resonates with the stories of these characters—I almost wish they could hear it, a song from the future echoing back toward them.
“My Red Little Fox” by Sufjan Stevens: “Beasts of the Chase”
This song captures the initial encounter—the kiss that seals the fox’s journey in Ninetails . I’ve loved Sufjan Stevens since I was in college—the weirdness, vulnerability, and lyricism in his songs have always been memorable and deeply felt to me. His songs crystallize so well the strangeness and wonder of life—growing up, love, grief, everything in between. In this song from his newest album, Javelin, the piano and soothing lullaby-like melody describe a “red little fox/and rivers running through it all,” much similar to the little red fox who runs from her captors at the center of my story “Beasts of the Chase.” While in Sufjan’s song the singer speaks tenderly toward the little red fox, saying “Don’t start with your camouflage…kiss me as I am lost,” the fox in my story has to abandon her dreams of tenderness (her gallant lover, gallant knight) and use her powers of camouflage and magnetic compass when she finds herself the quarry in a fox hunt. The dogs and huntsmen chase after her through the wild meadows, the rivers, the brambles reminiscent in the song’s lushness. At some point, the singer in “My Red Little Fox” addresses a Queen: “My love, my queen…,” almost as if referencing the Korean Queen (Queen Min Bi) at the center of “Beasts of the Chase,” who is rumored to evade her Japanese assassins in a plot they called “Operation Fox Hunt.”
“fallen alien” by FKA Twigs: “The Fig Queen”
FKA Twigs’ gorgeous album MAGDALENE palpitates—I love every song on it, but the song “fallen alien,” with its eerie buildup and frantic tempo, captures the emotional beats of my story “The Fig Queen.” In “The Fig Queen,” a woman shrinks into the size of an insect after experiencing heartbreak. Soon she sees another version of herself living her life for her, and that doppelganger gets back together with the person who broke her heart. She soon begins to notice the fig wasps all around her, their life mission to drive themselves into the fig flesh and decompose. By entering the flesh of the fig, she soon becomes alien, recounting the memories from her relationship that become far and farther away. In the song, FKA Twigs repeats, “I was waiting for you, I was outside/I’m a fallen alien,” reinforcing the feelings of this protagonist: much of her alienation is fed by how her lovers have treated her.
“It’s Okay to Cry” by SOPHIE: “The Girl with Flies Coming Out of Her Eyes”
This opening song in SOPHIE’s seminal 2017 hyperpop album Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides is a gorgeous, dreamy ballad, and its release as a single in 2017 was also profound because it was the first time SOPHIE stepped into the light, showing the world her voice, her face, her identity as a gorgeous trans artist. The song’s title actually echoes a line in the shortest story in Ninetails , “The Girl with Flies Coming Out of Her Eyes,” in which a woman suffers a malady where she cries flies instead of tears: “You’ve had this illness since the day you first turned into an adult, but you don’t remember that day because you don’t remember a day in your life when it was okay for you to cry.” The protagonist of this story I could see listening to this track, remembering Sophie, and crying, giving in, letting all the flies come out. The story is about shame, and loneliness, and self-cultivation—all which pour from the lyrics, the sound, the heart of this song.
“déjà vu” by Olivia Rodrigo: “Lotus Stench”
This song by fellow Pisces Olivia Rodrigo—one of my favorite karaoke songs—addresses a lover who moves on too fast, mirroring all of their shared experiences with his relationship with the new girl. In my story “Lotus Stench,” a retelling of the master of Liaozhai Pu Songling’s tale “Lotus Scent,” a fox and a ghost discover that the man they’re dating is two-timing them. In the original tale, they form a throuple with the man, but in my tale, they ditch the man to form their own friendship, gallivanting around New York City as two supernatural pranksters. What’s implied in the song is even though the new girlfriend thinks she’s forming a profound bond with this lover, what she’s really doing is forming a bond with Olivia. I want Olivia and the new girlfriend to also ditch this man in the song and form their own friendship.
“A Burning Hill” by Mitski: “The Crush”
“The Crush” is a story about a crushing crush (you know the feeling) set in a San Francisco beset by the glowing red penumbra of smoke from California wildfires. Morgan, the protagonist, meets a boy, falls for him, and then finds herself carrying a stone that grows larger and larger as she crushes harder. “A Burning Hill” by Mitski captures perhaps the after-effects, the aftershocks of such tremendous and devastating buildup of feeling. In the song, Mitski sings “I am the fire, and I am the forest,/And I am a witness watching it/I stand in a valley watching it” and it feels like the place where Morgan finds herself late in the story, gazing at a burning valley whose smoke plumes rise up, almost touching her.
“Kill Bill” by SZA: “A Huxian’s Guide to Seduction Revenge Immortality”
Of course, the fox spirit has to go in for the kill sometime. In “A Huxian’s Guide to Seduction Revenge Immortality,” a fox spirit takes revenge on a man whose seduction of a teenage girl led to her death. Like in many fox stories, our unnamed fox spirit has to seduce this predator first before taking vengeance on him. I love the campy murder quest at the center of SZA’s “Kill Bill,” and it captures the steadfastness of the fox in my story. The song, with its winky, unapologetic narrative, feels subversive to me. What SZA’s “Kill Bill” subverts is the assignation of women as the “crazy ex” – the ex who goes “crazy” after being treated badly in a relationship. Under the conditions of heteropatriarchy, SZA seems to be saying, who wouldn’t “snap”? In “Kill Bill,” the woman fully leans into this murderer role cavalierly, subverting a trope and also highlighting the ironic fact that women are more often the victims of violent crime in intimate relationships than the perpetrators. Similarly, the fox in “Huxian’s Guide” gathers endless instances of gendered violence from men in order to cultivate toward her final act of revenge.
“Song of the Setting Sun” (夕陽之歌) by Anita Mui: “Love Doll”
Anita Mui was a tragic titan of Hong Kong Cantopop, who left us too soon. Mui performed this song, “Song of the Setting Sun,” in an iconic concert, filmed only 45 days before she died of cervical cancer at just 40. She was wearing a dramatic wedding dress designed by Eddie Lau with a flounced veil and a long train that cascaded down the steps she walked up in her final moments. The wedding dress signaled not a wedding, but a goodbye. This song makes an appearance in the first story of Ninetails , “Love Doll,” in which a love doll begins to experience sensation through the assistance of a fox spirit. On her first ride into Hong Kong after being purchased at the sex shop, Annlee, the narrator/sex doll, listens to this song, “Song of the Setting Sun,” on the radio. The song is perhaps a portent of change—the lyrics to this song’s refrain are potent, referencing a sunset whose radiance lasts too briefly, extinguished in the night, and a person enduring the weathering of storms and dreams and passage of time, never return to joyful days because it’s too late. The song is an omen for Annlee, a love doll who has never felt feelings, that she is going to feel deeply.
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Sally Wen Mao is the acclaimed author of three poetry collections–Oculus which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and one of Time Magazine’s 100 Must-Read Books of 2019; Mad Honey Symposium, which named a Top Ten Debut of 2014 in Poets & Writers; and The Kingdom of Surfaces, a finalist for the 2023 Maya Angelou Book Award. The recipient of two Pushcart Prizes and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, she’s been published in The Paris Review, Harper Bazaar, Guenrica, PEN America, among others, with rave reviews of her writing in national outlets such as the New Yorker, NPR, and The Washington Post. She currently lives in New York City.
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