Mouth: Stories

(Hardback)

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In her debut collection, Puloma Ghosh stretches reality in her exploration of grief, sexuality, and bodily autonomy. Spinning tales full of ghosts, creatures, and gore, Mouth embraces the bizarre and absurd while reaching for the truth. In "Desiccation," 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 either 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. In "Persimmons," a girl comes to terms with her own community sacrifice. Mouth gives fangs, talons, and singular sharpness to the otherwise ordinary, awkward, and unmentionable. Surreal and captivating, Puloma Ghosh delves into otherworldly spaces while exploring the everyday struggles of isolation, longing, and the aching desires of our flesh. "This surreal collection of stories will blow your mind." -Debutiful BESTIARY MEETS THE DANGERS OF SMOKING IN BED IN THIS COLLECTION OF 11 EERIE, UNCANNY, AND SURREAL SHORT STORIES In her debut collection, Puloma Ghosh stretches reality in her exploration of grief, sexuality, and bodily autonomy. Spinning tales full of ghosts, creatures, and gore, Mouth embraces the bizarre and absurd while reaching for the truth. In "Desiccation," 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 either 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. In "Persimmons," a girl comes to terms with her own community sacrifice. Mouth gives fangs, talons, and singular sharpness to the otherwise ordinary, awkward, and unmentionable. Surreal and captivating, Puloma Ghosh delves into otherworldly spaces while exploring the everyday struggles of isolation, longing, and the aching desires of our flesh.

Reviews

These stories are so sharp, so strange, so precise - like perfect razors, meant to cut to the heart and open it up to the gasp of pain but also, to astonishing beauty.
Amber Sparks, author of And I Do Not Forgive You

"The 11 stories in Mouth are startling, surreal, utterly spectacular. Written in gorgeous and incisive prose and spanning an eerie homecoming in Kolkata to a journey through the flimsy fabric of time and space, Mouth is a work that will leave you forever changed. I have been waiting to read sharp, uncanny stories with this immensity of heart for years. This book is a revelation."
Megan Kamalei Kakimoto, author of Every Drop Is a Mans Nightmare

"Theres a cure for loneliness in each one of Puloma Ghoshs deceptively gentle and unsettling short stories, but always with a ghastly cost. With a penetrative gaze and devastating understanding of our world, Mouth is as sexy as it is uncanny and as gorgeous as it is disgusting. If a novel is a love affair then these short stories are a haunting handshake with a stranger that youll be thinking about in the middle of the night, somewhat frightened and a little bit aroused. Puloma Ghosh is the new spectralfiction queen of our time."
Melissa Lozada-Oliva, author of Dreaming of You and Candelaria

"Puloma Ghosh is brillianta writer whose vision is wholly unique, quite often brutal or surreal, yet so oddly insinuating that within half a sentence you'll find that you've adopted it as your own. Each of the stories in Mouth presents an entire world in miniature, and if those worlds shimmer with irreality, well, so does ours; and if they swerve past the edges of expectation, well, so does ours; and if they bruise you or break your heart, well, ours does, too."
Kevin Brockmeier, author of Ghost Variations and The Brief History of the Dead

"Ghosh has somehow taken our insecurities and doubts and rendered them into a gruesome, macabre, and titillating collection of tales. The prose sears every page. Mouth is a marvel of imagination and a most impressive debut. Ghosh is a writer to follow."
Alejandro Varela, author of the 2022 National Book Award fiction finalist, The Town of Babylon

"Beautiful and unsettling, creepy and so deeply human: this collection delights with the unexpected, in the gorgeous prose, in the unbound imagination in the stories, and in the formal play . . . All while interrogating lies, truth, and what is real in the vivid description that brings the world Ghosh creates alive."
Ananda Lima, Michigan Quarterly Review

"This surreal collection of stories will blow your mind. Both with the content and how well Ghosh has mastered the short story. Each story in this collection bends genre and weaves through expectations. Each one left my jaw on the floor."
Adam Vitcavage, Debutiful

Author Bio

Puloma Ghosh is a fiction writer based in Chicago whose work has appeared in One Story, CRAFT Literary, Cutleaf, and other publications. This is her first book.