Mouth: Stories

＂This surreal collection of stories will blow your mind.＂ --Debutiful

＂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

＂Mouth is a work that will leave you forever changed.＂ --Megan Kamalei Kakimoto, author of Every Drop Is a Man’s Nightmare

BESTIARY MEETS THE DANGERS OF SMOKING IN BED IN THIS COLLECTION OF 11 EERIE, UNCANNY, AND SURREAL SHORT STORIES

In this debut collection, Puloma Ghosh spins tales of creatures and gore to explore grief, sexuality, and bodily autonomy. Embracing the bizarre and absurd, Mouth stretches reality to reach for truth.

＂Desiccation＂ follows a teen figure skater with necrophiliac fantasies who is convinced the other Indian girl at the rink is a vampire. When a woman returns to Kolkata in ＂The Fig Tree,＂ she can’t tell if she is haunted by her dead 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.

Full of fangs and talons, Mouth lays bare the otherwise awkward and unmentionable with a singular sharpness. Through surreal and captivating prose, Puloma Ghosh delves into otherworldly spaces to reimagine ordinary 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. This is her first book.