Tell Me Pleasant Things about Immortality is the latest book from bestselling Canadian author Lindsay Wong.

Wong's adult fiction debut is a dark and poignant collection of "immigrant horror stories." From Shanghai to Vancouver, the women in Tell Me Pleasant Things about Immortality haunt and are haunted — by first loves, troublesome family members and traumatic memories.

Featuring elements of horror, the supernatural and mythology, Tell Me Pleasant Things about Immortality examines contemporary life and illuminates the ways in which the past informs the present.

Wong is a Vancouver-based author. She holds a BFA in creative writing from the University of British Columbia and an MFA in literary nonfiction from Columbia University.

Wong's debut memoir The Woo-Woo is a darkly comic story of her dysfunctional family who blame their woes on ghosts and demons. The Woo-Woo was a finalist for the 2018 Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction and was defended by Joe Zee on Canada Reads 2019.

CBC Books named Wong a writer to watch and My Summer of Love and Misfortune, her first YA novel, was published in 2020.

After writing memoir and YA, writing a story collection for adults was "really difficult," Wong told CBC Books via email.

"Everyone says memoir is the genre to avoid but the short story form is probably the most challenging. On a craft level, you have to be quite ruthless with scenes and precise with language and imagery. It's a lesson in learning how not to be long winded. Half joking but not really. With short stories, you have to aim for something close to perfectionism, which is quite stressful," said Wong.

"I didn't really think I would venture into horror or fabulism as I studied nonfiction in grad school and began my career as a memoirist. I thought I would stay firmly in the realm of contemporary literature when I ventured into fiction. But I guess I'm open to seeing where the writing takes me."

Tell Me Pleasant Things about Immortality will be available on Feb. 21, 2023.

You can read an excerpt from Sorry Sister Eunice, a story from Tell Me Pleasant Things about Immortality, below.

We call Sister Eunice an anomaly because her rotund form is truly unrecognizable. Her earth-like circumference and squat stature would probably be the same if someone brainy were to measure her ratio of gravity to girth.

All of us nine-tail fox demons, except for Sister Eunice, are model-thin, five nine and divinely beautiful in both fox and human form. Plus, like all huli jing, we have luxurious manes, angular features and golden-brown eyes. We look permanently photoshopped.

Eunice's skin is potholed like a steamed rice cake. Her breath always smells like fermented dairy. The closest we've been to this sort of unpleasing odour was in the fifteenth century, when lice was rampant in the courts of the Yongle Emperor.

Even though none of us want to be Sister Eunice, we think she's hilarious. At group dinner tonight, she shows us her swollen foot and missing shoe.

"I got so drunk this morning I fell down the stairs," she says, pushing up her lenses that remind us of laboratory safety goggles. "Then I woke up on the lawn and I'd lost my Jimmy Choo."

"Oh, sh-t, you poor thing!" we all exclaim. We do our best to tolerate Eunice because that's what good families do. "Yep," she says, pushing her hair over her face like a shower curtain. "Fifth time this semester."

Come to think of it, Sister Eunice has a bit of a drug and alcohol problem. Actually, we all do. You would too if you were immortal, over six hundred years old and masquerading as a twenty-something-old Gen-Zer in an all-Asian sorority, Sigma Omicron Pi, at San Francisco State U.

For centuries, we huli jing have been migrating and shapeshifting into human form. We have travelled through the wild terrains of China, Korea and Japan, destroying townships, marriages, and political careers with enthusiasm. Behind our penchant for destruction lies a manic appetite for human gristle. Once you've gnawed on a merchant on a ship to India or a hopeful farmer looking for a wife, it's hard to be content with a stomach half-empty with rabbit.

Fox demons are selfish creatures, meant to inhabit caves in the black forests of Xinjiang alone. We are not meant to live as pack members at an old colonial mansion, protected by the collegiate moss and the genteel veneer of an Ivy Tower. It still baffles us that we are forced to share our prey — the frat boy who reeks of beer and the stoner-loner with Dorito breath. We suppose it's just good table manners.

During our biweekly group dinner, while sucking on tendons and crunching pelvic bones, we want to lunge and tear out each other's throats. But it's against house rules at Sigma Omicron Pi. Thou shalt not kill or maim a huli jing sister until threat of extinction is over. By dessert time, which is always raw liver, we think about smothering each other with fluffy pink pillows. By after-dinner drinks, we wonder why we don't just throw ourselves out a window.

"So, Eunice," we say instead, forcing down our instincts for mass homicide and suicide, "tell us what happened again to your shoe?" What we don't tell Sister Eunice is that one of us stole her right Jimmy Choo after she passed out drinking a dozen rum and Cokes.

Sometimes when we're intoxicated, we waltz into campus bars and shake our immortal asses to Ariana Grande and Drake. Sister Cee-Cee will badly karaoke to Aretha Franklin, while Sister Tiffany will jam her pink fox tongue down a young visiting scholar's throat. We clutch our gin and tonics to our chests and because we are masquerading as oversexed sorority girls, we occasionally dry-hump one another when we think people are looking. As the night goes on, we loudly sob-sigh for our former lives in Asia, for days of no electricity, pre-internet, when the huli jing were influential starters and manipulators of epic wars between fiefdoms.

Under the bar's strobe lights, there's a cruel, scorching hope reflected in each of our gleaming corneas. We crave a permanent return to chaos and nature. It's hard to admit that we're practically irrelevant nowadays. That human beings no longer need the huli jing to assist them in the destruction of their own species.

Adapted from Tell Me Pleasant Things about Immortality by Lindsay Wong. Copyright © 2023 Lindsay Wong. Published by Penguin Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Reproduced by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.