Fangs, talons, and a singular sharpness…
We’re thrilled to share the cover of Puloma Ghosh’s Mouth, a collection of eleven eerie, uncanny, and surreal short stories—available from Astra House on June 11, 2024.
Bestiary meets The Dangers of Smoking in Bed in this collection of eleven eerie, uncanny, and surreal short stories.
In this debut collection, Puloma Ghosh uses the speculative as a catalyst to push her stories and characters beyond what reality allows. Exploring grief, intimacy, sexuality, and bodily autonomy, Mouth leans into the bizarre and absurd while reaching for the truth.
In “Dessication,” a teen figure skater with necrophiliac tendencies is convinced the only other Indian girl at the rink is a vampire. A woman returns to Kolkata in “The Fig Tree,” where she is haunted by her deceased mother or a shakchunni, or both. “Nip” bottles up the consuming and addictive nature of infatuation while “Natalya” is a hair-raising autopsy of an ex-lover. And in “Persimmons,” a girl comes to terms with her own community sacrifice.
Blurring the lines of conventional reality and giving fangs, talons, and singular sharpness to the otherwise ordinary, awkward, and unmentionable, Mouth’s surrealism is both unique and captivating. Puloma Ghosh reaches into otherworldly spaces while exploring the everyday struggles of isolation, longing, and the aching desires of our flesh.
Puloma Ghosh is a fiction writer based in Chicago whose work has appeared in One Story and CRAFT Literary as the 2020 Flash Fiction Contest Winner, among other publications. Her stories have received honorable mention for the Zoetrope: All-Story Short Fiction Competition and the Ploughshares Emerging Writers Contest, and placed as finalist for the New Letters Robert Day Award for Fiction, CRAFT Literary’s Short Fiction Contest, and the Meridian Editor’s Prize. This is her first book.
