Description:
Editorial Reviews
Review
—Ruth Minah Buchwald, CRAFT Literary
"[A] surreal debut . . . Mouth is a collection hungry with desire. Ghosh’s stories are urgent and her characters insatiable."
—Electric Literature
"Ghosh’s language is vibrant—full of texture and physicality, capturing desire in all its visceral, guttural complexity . . . Ghosh imbues her pages with an intoxicating aroma of desire, one that crosses boundaries of culture, temporality, genre, and sentience . . . This collection is a stunning debut, bitingly evocative and delightfully uncomfortable, worth returning to again and again with new eyes and new longings."
—Las Vegas Review of Books
"Puloma Ghosh's Mouth is one of the best debut short story collections ever."
—Adam Vitcavage, Debutiful
"Puloma Ghosh’s short story collection, Mouth, pulses with relatability . . . When Ghosh is on fire, her prose is incandescent with the heat and bite of personal conviction. What I like best is her treatment of impulsiveness; her best characters are truly carpe diem’ing their way to their most authentic selves in the most bizarre circumstances . . . A formidable debut."
—Alexis Ong, Reactor
"Emotionally luminous . . . [Mouth] subverted all my expectations for its spookiness, and made me realize the real horror is our own lives—we too can become monstrous."
—Sam Herschel Wein, Chicago Review of Books
"Like its suggestively sensuous and chilling book cover, Ghosh’s Mouth holds within it eleven excellent examples of spectral fiction where a hair-raising premise provides not only a fun read, but also allows entry into necessary feelings of grief, desire, loss, love, and alienation."
—Misha Rai, Kenyon Review
"Surreal and horrifying . . . Mouth is a collection that sinks its teeth into you, with evocative prose and a sense of urgency that are sure to leave a mark."
—Michael Welch, Chicago Review of Books
"The mundane and the extraordinary mesh into new and fascinating shapes in this debut story collection . . . Ghosh shows incredible range, imagination, and depth of feeling with this first collection. A unique set of stories that show the promise of a bold new voice."
—Kirkus Reviews
"Sometimes surreal, sometimes horrifying, always startling . . . these stories will unsettle and fascinate in equal measure . . . Like K-Ming Chang's carnal prose, Ghosh's delights in even the grotesque sides of sex and rebirth . . . Mouth introduces readers to Puloma Ghosh's unmatched ability to probe the visceral depths of female pain, desire, and grief."
—Alice Martin, Shelf Awareness
"Ghosh sharply draws the contours of her invented worlds and evokes her characters’ insatiable desires with vibrant imagery . . . These stories effectively sustain a sense of the uncanny."
—Publishers Weekly
"Ghosh’s stories reveal a promising, jagged new literary voice."
—Leah von Essen, Booklist
“These stories are a marvel, at once sensual and unsettling, strange and yet achingly familiar. Puloma Ghosh has conjured a wholly original literary exploration of loneliness, eroticism, loss, grief, and the ghosts of the heart—a human haunting for which there is no exorcism.”
—Libba Bray, #1 New York Times bestselling author
“I love Puloma Ghosh’s knife-sharp, spectral stories. Mouth ushers readers into a world filled with poltergeist roommates, haunted houses, reality-shifting anomalies—and women who seek to know the world, ghosts and all. This is a stunning and original collection.”
—Laura van den Berg, author of I Hold a Wolf By the Ears
"Puloma Ghosh is the high priestess of horny women who long for death, approach the altar at your own peril. Mouth holds you in the strange liminal spaces of the near future and lets you look around, fending off and falling in love with the lonely, beautiful, lost creatures. Her pop stars, persimmons, and zombie figure skaters navigate a hostile world that might soon be our own, with the curiosity and anxiety that makes you wonder if it's already here. Each story is a haunting song you could swear you've heard before."
—Jamie Loftus, author of Raw Dog
"This one is not for normal readers. This one is for weirdos. The people who like the weirdness to creep up on them until you’re wondering how far the creep is gonna go, the ones who understand the intrinsic link between sexuality and sadness. Puloma Ghosh’s stories are about obsession and hunger and yearning, about feeling alone and strange, about blood and sex and the pain of belonging to two places and nowhere all at the same time . . . With effortless prose and skillfully applied surrealism, Mouth is an unforgettable debut collection from a writer I cannot wait to see more from."
—Christina Orlando, Reactor
"The characters in Puloma Ghosh's first short story collection stalk your subconscious like creatures prowling the forest's edge. With morbid imagination, pitch-black humor and even darker empathy, Ghosh imagines realities we cannot and explores the private squirms of want in the numb, hungry people she finds there. Alluring, dreamlike, unforgettable."
—Jayson Greene, author of Once More We Saw Stars
"Werewolf lovers, cemetery girls, beasts that have no name—this collection is both tender and disgusting. Fraught and languid. Ghosh is a witch with words. She's in a dark covenant with our greatest writers who aren't afraid to explore the horrors and joys of womanhood: Samantha Hunt, Mariana Enriquez, Kelly Link, Angela Carter, Carmen Maria Machado, Helen Oyeyemi, Shirley Jackson. . . A collection of contemporary fairy tales perfect for strange women and the beings that love them."
—Molly McGhee, author of Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind
"These stories are hot to the touch. I loved the wildness here, where sensuality lives beside terror. Mouth will kiss—with teeth."
—Shruti Swamy, author of A House Is a Body
"These stories are insidiously terrifying, cunning & deeply empathetic — with Mouth, Ghosh has offered us a masterclass in surrealist short fiction, bound to haunt its readers long after they’ve put down the book."
—Olivia Gatwood, author of Whoever You Are, Honey
“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 Man’s Nightmare
"There’s a cure for loneliness in each one of Puloma Ghosh’s 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 you’ll be thinking about in the middle of the night, somewhat frightened and a little bit aroused. Puloma Ghosh is the new spectral fiction queen of our time."
—Melissa Lozada-Oliva, author of Dreaming of You and Candelaria
"Puloma Ghosh is brilliant—a 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
About the Author
Reviews:
5.0 out of 5 stars Innovative and haunting short stories
I read sooooo many short stories. I’ve spent the last six years reading a short story (almost) every day, and I appreciate a truly original, gripping tale. Puloma Ghosh’s debut collection, Mouth, with its well-crafted, weird, female-centered stories, filled me with joy.I was won over by the opening story, Desiccation, about a strange, shut-off town, where men go "missing" when they reach a certain age. There’s another odd town in Leaving Things, which has been overrun by wolves, but one woman insists on sticking around.I loved Anomaly, where a woman goes on a date with someone to a weird wormhole thing. The theme of holes in the universe is continued in Lemon Boy, where a girl meets a boy with lemon-colored hair at a party, where he thinks he's seen his dead ex.The final story, Persimmon, was probably my favorite. A girl prepares for her last day of freedom, before she is sacrificed to a tree.There is such a wide variety of imagination on display here. All the stories in Mouth are truly original and exciting.
3.0 out of 5 stars Strong first half, mediocre second half.
These stories are not for the faint of heart. I absolutely loved exploring the mind of the writer. However the last three stories were meh and seemed as though they were thrown in to fill pages.
4.0 out of 5 stars Delightful & unpredictable
Surprisingly, this collection MOUTH is the first time I've read Puloma Ghosh. I really enjoyed the anthology, in large part because I do not know what to expect when I started each story. That factor alone was a delight. Some stories took a slightly squeamish turn, others a wonderfully surreal mode. I'll be using a few of these short stories and recommending the full collection to my short story students this summer.
5.0 out of 5 stars Mesmerizing
Mouth by Puloma Ghosh is a collection of stories that will get under your skin. Each story had an underlying sense of foreboding and left you questioning what you just read. This collection was beautiful and mesmerizing. They each leave you a sense of what it is like to be a woman while suffering, living, experiencing joy and connection. I will be thinking about these stories for many years to come.
Visit the Astra House Store
Mouth: Stories
AED16009
Quantity:
Order today to get by 7-14 business days
Delivery fee of AED 20. Free for orders above AED 200.
Imported From: United States
At BOLO, we work hard to ensure the products you receive are new, genuine, and sourced from reputable suppliers.
BOLO is not an authorized or official retailer for most brands, nor are we affiliated with manufacturers unless specifically stated on a product page. Instead, we source verified sellers, authorized distributors or directly from the manufacturer.
Each product undergoes thorough inspection and verification at our consolidation and fulfilment centers to ensure it meets our strict authenticity and quality standards before being shipped and delivered to you.
If you ever have concerns regarding the authenticity of a product purchased from us, please contact Bolo Support. We will review your inquiry promptly and, if necessary, provide documentation verifying authenticity or offer a suitable resolution.
Your trust is our top priority, and we are committed to maintaining transparency and integrity in every transaction.
All product information, images, descriptions, and reviews originate from the manufacturer or from trusted sellers overseas. BOLO is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or an authorized retailer for most brands listed on our website unless stated otherwise.
While we strive to display accurate information, variations in packaging, labeling, instructions, or formulation may occasionally occur due to regional differences or supplier updates. For detailed or manufacturer-specific information, please contact the brand directly or reach out to BOLO Support for assistance.
Unless otherwise stated, all prices displayed on the product page include applicable taxes and import duties.
BOLO operates in accordance with the laws and regulations of United Arab Emirates. Any items found to be restricted or prohibited for sale within the UAE will be cancelled prior to shipment. We take proactive measures to ensure that only products permitted for sale in United Arab Emirates are listed on our website.
All items are shipped by air, and any products classified as “Dangerous Goods (DG)” under IATA regulations will be removed from the order and cancelled.
All orders are processed manually, and we make every effort to process them promptly once confirmed. Products cancelled due to the above reasons will be permanently removed from listings across the website.
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Visit the Astra House Store
Mouth: Stories
AED16009
Quantity:
Order today to get by 7-14 business days
Delivery fee of AED 20. Free for orders above AED 200.
Imported From: United States
At BOLO, we work hard to ensure the products you receive are new, genuine, and sourced from reputable suppliers.
BOLO is not an authorized or official retailer for most brands, nor are we affiliated with manufacturers unless specifically stated on a product page. Instead, we source verified sellers, authorized distributors or directly from the manufacturer.
Each product undergoes thorough inspection and verification at our consolidation and fulfilment centers to ensure it meets our strict authenticity and quality standards before being shipped and delivered to you.
If you ever have concerns regarding the authenticity of a product purchased from us, please contact Bolo Support. We will review your inquiry promptly and, if necessary, provide documentation verifying authenticity or offer a suitable resolution.
Your trust is our top priority, and we are committed to maintaining transparency and integrity in every transaction.
All product information, images, descriptions, and reviews originate from the manufacturer or from trusted sellers overseas. BOLO is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or an authorized retailer for most brands listed on our website unless stated otherwise.
While we strive to display accurate information, variations in packaging, labeling, instructions, or formulation may occasionally occur due to regional differences or supplier updates. For detailed or manufacturer-specific information, please contact the brand directly or reach out to BOLO Support for assistance.
Unless otherwise stated, all prices displayed on the product page include applicable taxes and import duties.
BOLO operates in accordance with the laws and regulations of United Arab Emirates. Any items found to be restricted or prohibited for sale within the UAE will be cancelled prior to shipment. We take proactive measures to ensure that only products permitted for sale in United Arab Emirates are listed on our website.
All items are shipped by air, and any products classified as “Dangerous Goods (DG)” under IATA regulations will be removed from the order and cancelled.
All orders are processed manually, and we make every effort to process them promptly once confirmed. Products cancelled due to the above reasons will be permanently removed from listings across the website.
Description:
Editorial Reviews
Review
—Ruth Minah Buchwald, CRAFT Literary
"[A] surreal debut . . . Mouth is a collection hungry with desire. Ghosh’s stories are urgent and her characters insatiable."
—Electric Literature
"Ghosh’s language is vibrant—full of texture and physicality, capturing desire in all its visceral, guttural complexity . . . Ghosh imbues her pages with an intoxicating aroma of desire, one that crosses boundaries of culture, temporality, genre, and sentience . . . This collection is a stunning debut, bitingly evocative and delightfully uncomfortable, worth returning to again and again with new eyes and new longings."
—Las Vegas Review of Books
"Puloma Ghosh's Mouth is one of the best debut short story collections ever."
—Adam Vitcavage, Debutiful
"Puloma Ghosh’s short story collection, Mouth, pulses with relatability . . . When Ghosh is on fire, her prose is incandescent with the heat and bite of personal conviction. What I like best is her treatment of impulsiveness; her best characters are truly carpe diem’ing their way to their most authentic selves in the most bizarre circumstances . . . A formidable debut."
—Alexis Ong, Reactor
"Emotionally luminous . . . [Mouth] subverted all my expectations for its spookiness, and made me realize the real horror is our own lives—we too can become monstrous."
—Sam Herschel Wein, Chicago Review of Books
"Like its suggestively sensuous and chilling book cover, Ghosh’s Mouth holds within it eleven excellent examples of spectral fiction where a hair-raising premise provides not only a fun read, but also allows entry into necessary feelings of grief, desire, loss, love, and alienation."
—Misha Rai, Kenyon Review
"Surreal and horrifying . . . Mouth is a collection that sinks its teeth into you, with evocative prose and a sense of urgency that are sure to leave a mark."
—Michael Welch, Chicago Review of Books
"The mundane and the extraordinary mesh into new and fascinating shapes in this debut story collection . . . Ghosh shows incredible range, imagination, and depth of feeling with this first collection. A unique set of stories that show the promise of a bold new voice."
—Kirkus Reviews
"Sometimes surreal, sometimes horrifying, always startling . . . these stories will unsettle and fascinate in equal measure . . . Like K-Ming Chang's carnal prose, Ghosh's delights in even the grotesque sides of sex and rebirth . . . Mouth introduces readers to Puloma Ghosh's unmatched ability to probe the visceral depths of female pain, desire, and grief."
—Alice Martin, Shelf Awareness
"Ghosh sharply draws the contours of her invented worlds and evokes her characters’ insatiable desires with vibrant imagery . . . These stories effectively sustain a sense of the uncanny."
—Publishers Weekly
"Ghosh’s stories reveal a promising, jagged new literary voice."
—Leah von Essen, Booklist
“These stories are a marvel, at once sensual and unsettling, strange and yet achingly familiar. Puloma Ghosh has conjured a wholly original literary exploration of loneliness, eroticism, loss, grief, and the ghosts of the heart—a human haunting for which there is no exorcism.”
—Libba Bray, #1 New York Times bestselling author
“I love Puloma Ghosh’s knife-sharp, spectral stories. Mouth ushers readers into a world filled with poltergeist roommates, haunted houses, reality-shifting anomalies—and women who seek to know the world, ghosts and all. This is a stunning and original collection.”
—Laura van den Berg, author of I Hold a Wolf By the Ears
"Puloma Ghosh is the high priestess of horny women who long for death, approach the altar at your own peril. Mouth holds you in the strange liminal spaces of the near future and lets you look around, fending off and falling in love with the lonely, beautiful, lost creatures. Her pop stars, persimmons, and zombie figure skaters navigate a hostile world that might soon be our own, with the curiosity and anxiety that makes you wonder if it's already here. Each story is a haunting song you could swear you've heard before."
—Jamie Loftus, author of Raw Dog
"This one is not for normal readers. This one is for weirdos. The people who like the weirdness to creep up on them until you’re wondering how far the creep is gonna go, the ones who understand the intrinsic link between sexuality and sadness. Puloma Ghosh’s stories are about obsession and hunger and yearning, about feeling alone and strange, about blood and sex and the pain of belonging to two places and nowhere all at the same time . . . With effortless prose and skillfully applied surrealism, Mouth is an unforgettable debut collection from a writer I cannot wait to see more from."
—Christina Orlando, Reactor
"The characters in Puloma Ghosh's first short story collection stalk your subconscious like creatures prowling the forest's edge. With morbid imagination, pitch-black humor and even darker empathy, Ghosh imagines realities we cannot and explores the private squirms of want in the numb, hungry people she finds there. Alluring, dreamlike, unforgettable."
—Jayson Greene, author of Once More We Saw Stars
"Werewolf lovers, cemetery girls, beasts that have no name—this collection is both tender and disgusting. Fraught and languid. Ghosh is a witch with words. She's in a dark covenant with our greatest writers who aren't afraid to explore the horrors and joys of womanhood: Samantha Hunt, Mariana Enriquez, Kelly Link, Angela Carter, Carmen Maria Machado, Helen Oyeyemi, Shirley Jackson. . . A collection of contemporary fairy tales perfect for strange women and the beings that love them."
—Molly McGhee, author of Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind
"These stories are hot to the touch. I loved the wildness here, where sensuality lives beside terror. Mouth will kiss—with teeth."
—Shruti Swamy, author of A House Is a Body
"These stories are insidiously terrifying, cunning & deeply empathetic — with Mouth, Ghosh has offered us a masterclass in surrealist short fiction, bound to haunt its readers long after they’ve put down the book."
—Olivia Gatwood, author of Whoever You Are, Honey
“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 Man’s Nightmare
"There’s a cure for loneliness in each one of Puloma Ghosh’s 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 you’ll be thinking about in the middle of the night, somewhat frightened and a little bit aroused. Puloma Ghosh is the new spectral fiction queen of our time."
—Melissa Lozada-Oliva, author of Dreaming of You and Candelaria
"Puloma Ghosh is brilliant—a 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
About the Author
Reviews:
5.0 out of 5 stars Innovative and haunting short stories
I read sooooo many short stories. I’ve spent the last six years reading a short story (almost) every day, and I appreciate a truly original, gripping tale. Puloma Ghosh’s debut collection, Mouth, with its well-crafted, weird, female-centered stories, filled me with joy.I was won over by the opening story, Desiccation, about a strange, shut-off town, where men go "missing" when they reach a certain age. There’s another odd town in Leaving Things, which has been overrun by wolves, but one woman insists on sticking around.I loved Anomaly, where a woman goes on a date with someone to a weird wormhole thing. The theme of holes in the universe is continued in Lemon Boy, where a girl meets a boy with lemon-colored hair at a party, where he thinks he's seen his dead ex.The final story, Persimmon, was probably my favorite. A girl prepares for her last day of freedom, before she is sacrificed to a tree.There is such a wide variety of imagination on display here. All the stories in Mouth are truly original and exciting.
3.0 out of 5 stars Strong first half, mediocre second half.
These stories are not for the faint of heart. I absolutely loved exploring the mind of the writer. However the last three stories were meh and seemed as though they were thrown in to fill pages.
4.0 out of 5 stars Delightful & unpredictable
Surprisingly, this collection MOUTH is the first time I've read Puloma Ghosh. I really enjoyed the anthology, in large part because I do not know what to expect when I started each story. That factor alone was a delight. Some stories took a slightly squeamish turn, others a wonderfully surreal mode. I'll be using a few of these short stories and recommending the full collection to my short story students this summer.
5.0 out of 5 stars Mesmerizing
Mouth by Puloma Ghosh is a collection of stories that will get under your skin. Each story had an underlying sense of foreboding and left you questioning what you just read. This collection was beautiful and mesmerizing. They each leave you a sense of what it is like to be a woman while suffering, living, experiencing joy and connection. I will be thinking about these stories for many years to come.
Similar suggestions by Bolo
More from this brand
Similar items from “Anthologies”
Share with
Or share with link
https://www.bolo.ae/products/U1662602472