𝔓𝔯𝔢-𝔒𝔯𝔡𝔢𝔯 ✻ Wavering Futures

Advance Praise

“Never have I read such stunningly apt wishes and warnings to survive our fragmented fantasy-reality. Shen’s writing polishes and muddies a prism of today’s past, present, and future that we both hold and push so near and far. Erotics and bodies and technology as openings as wounds as invitations to desire to resist. This book will leave you aching and curious — and then stay with you, poking a bruise to see what new colours will bloom while you heal.”

—Sennah Yee

author of How Do I Look?

“Kawai Shen is my favorite agitator of revolutionary desire. Earnest in her angst and yearning, and alive to the possibilities that disorder and pain can open, her collection approaches big subjects from strikingly intimate angles, with vignettes as strangely satisfying as picking at a scab. Moving from teenage summer scenes, sparing yet sumptuous in their autoeroticism, to a meditation on the mosh pit social-politic, to bondage play and epistolary romance unfolding in a speculative fascist dystopia, Shen pursues her obsessions with such care and sureness I am a willing submissive, ready to follow wherever she goes.”

—Whitney Mallett

founding editor of The Whitney Review of New Writing
and co-editor of Barbie Dreamhouse: An Architectural Survey

“Wavering Futures is alive with precise physicality. Whether Shen is writing about a scene that doesn’t go as planned, piercing hooks into a sub’s chest, surfing the web in the 90s as its own physical space, or about the mosh pits of the past as somewhere “to create our own inverted worlds,” her writing engages the reader with visceral images and multiple pleasures. Impressive in its hybridity and multiplicity, Shen’s Wavering Futures reminds us we can create our own inverted worlds, ones we have agency in creating, ones where we can bask in pleasure, rather than the doomsday dystopian world we live in.”

—Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch

author of knot body and The Good Arabs
and winner of the Grand Prix du Livre de Montreal 2022

“Ecstatic? Nightmarish! Earnest? Scholarly! From the mosh pit to the bacchanal, the riverbank to the dungeon, Kawai Shen plots a rollercoaster course through apocalypse that all comes back to our middles. Climb on and let yourself hang upside down in Shen’s vision, all her own.”

—Lee Suksi

author of The Nerves and Acting On You

Reviews and Media

CBC Books – Fiction Books Coming Out in Spring We’re Excited to Read

“Wavering Futures is a collection of fiction and prose that refuses to be defined. In three sections of short vignettes, it examines ecological and emotional breakdown while showing a sense of fight for the future, whatever it may bring.”

Kawai Shen

Kawai Shen is a writer based in Toronto. Her fiction was shortlisted for the 6th edition of The Metatron Prize for Rising Authors and was selected for the Best Canadian Stories 2025 anthology. She has also published work in The Malahat Review, The Fiddlehead, The Ex-Puritan, khōréō, The Walrus, The Whitney Review, and more.

This book was made possible with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts Literary Publishing Projects grant.