How I Became a Black Man and Other Metamorphoses »

Best known for his public battle with Shaquille O'Neal over Shaq's "ching-chong" taunts of Yao Ming, writer and journalist Irwin Tang is again making a scene.

How I Became A Black Man and Other Metamorphoses is a collection of eight hilarious and heart-rending stories that spring from Irwin Tang's life and surreal times.

In this debut collection's most bizarre story, "thing," an unidentifiable object asks, "What am I?" Answer: In the title story, I am a Chinese boy growing into a Black man. In "Eatiful," I am an existentialist waiter who undergoes a digestive epiphany in the restaurant bathroom. In "Two, One," I am an idealistic hip hopper tempted to sell out to maintain a friendship with my dope-dealing "Siamese twin." In "Cheese," I am a family torn asunder by a block of government cheese.

Set in a small Texas college town, the eight stories play off each other in theme, symbolism, and style. Flying food, wonton innuendo, the obliteration of identity, the dead and their upheaval, coolness and goodness, the continuation of continuation, Confucius, breakdancing, World War II, Barbie and Ken, and the Tangsta are all bound together in this delightful volume. In a world of staid fiction, Irwin Tang is a fresh-voiced neophyte whose biography and kaleidoscopic worldview infuse each of these often surreal stories with authenticity, reverence, and goofy humor. While a search for identity haunts these stories, they cohere, ironically, to form a complex portrait of the author.

Fiction Circus - John Thornton

"All levels of postmodernism are here, from the concretely human to the abstractly inhuman . . . . Whatever your comfort level, Tang can provide, and provide with music, color, and all flavors of wit."