AustLit

Look Who’s Morphing by Tom Cho is a collection of short stories in which a narrator, also called Tom, has surreal experiences in a range of situations. Deeply influenced by pop culture and highly intertextual and self-reflexive in nature, the collection references movies including Dirty Dancing, The Exorcist, and The Bodyguard. This intertextuality extends to the title of the book, which echoes the title of the 1989 Amy Heckerling film Look Who's Talking.

This trail below collects a range of items to enhance readers' engagement with the collection.

– Part One examines the book's pop culture references.

– Part Two discusses the self-reflexivity and autobiographical elements in the stories.

– Part Three draws together some of Cho's discussions of his work. The trail draws to a close by listing interviews, book reviews, and further reading. Some of these critical works and other resources are available to read online.

Click the hyperlinks in the citations below to be taken to the full text.

Tom Cho's stories often reference, rewrite, or otherwise play with popular film and television. Below are some examples.

The narrator of the stories in Look Who's Morphing seems to be consistent throughout the stories, and seems to share more than just a name with the author. One of the fun elements of this collection is the stories' insistent playfulness with autobiographical references. For example, perhaps the Auntie Wei character is modelled on the real-life author's aunt. Perhaps the real-life aunt even wore a novelty apron with plastic breasts, as the character does in the story 'The Exorcist.' But it seems unlikely that the real-life aunt would become possessed and speak in the narrator's voice, spitting back at him excerpts from his successful Australia Council grant applications. The resources below show critics and reviewers grappling with the seemingly autobiographical elements of the stories. Click on the hyperlinks in the citations below to be taken to the full text.

Tom Cho has written and spoken about the themes and preoccupations of his creative work, and his pop cultural and other influences. You can learn more about his approach to writing in the examples below. Click on the hyperlinks in the citations below to be taken to the full text or audio.

The following interviews provide further insight into the author and his works.

Cho has collected on his website tomcho.com a large number of reviews of Look Who's Morphing from a range of publications. Many of these reviews are available to read in archived versions of Cho's website, which have been preserved by the National Library of Australia's PANDORA archive.

Tom Cho's work is strongly connected to zine and fan fiction cultures.

Fan fiction is fan-written fiction that draws on existing fictional characters or worlds to tell or continue to tell stories.

Zines are self-published works that often include text and images, and are reproduced in small numbers. Zines are so diverse in nature, topic, and style that it is quite difficult to define them—which is part of their appeal. To learn more about zines, look at the websites of distributors such as The Sticky Institute or Take Care.

Academics who have written about zines include Anna Poletti, in her book Intimate Ephemera (Melbourne University Press 2008) and Kirsty Leishman, in her thesis Becoming Zine: The Place of Zines in Australia's Cultural Life (2004). Cho formerly produced a zine based on the Sweet Valley High series. Listed below are some other Australian zine authors.

• Vanessa Berry is a zine maker and artist. You can read about her work at her website.

• Luke You is the creator of the weekly zine YOU.

• Paul is a zine maker whose zines include erotic fan fiction about Bruce Springsteen and a Bananarama zine.

• The State Library of Victoria tries to include zines, comics and graphic novels as part of its collection, and you can see some examples here.