Don't let my rating fool you; Mouth was an interesting read! Through the idea of mouths, Puloma Ghost, in eleven dark and consuming short stories, explores loneliness, sexuality, relationships and grief. My rating is more so because i'm new to reading short stories.

Thank you so much to NetGalley and Astra House for providing me with an e-arc.

An interesting, speculative short story collection exploring themes of queerness, consumption, grief, bodies and desire that reminded me of Julia Armfield and K-Ming Chang. Unfortunately I found myself skim reading a couple of these and it won’t be a collection that sticks with me but I can definitely see other people loving this one!!

I loved every story in Mouth, this debut novel of short stories. That rarely happens with me. I appreciate that not every one will be for me but I was seduced by the imaginative stories and writing. This collection of speculative fiction starts with the ordinary lives of people but soon becomes haunting, surreal and evocative. Even if you don't like all the stories, I think you will enjoy most of them. Definitely a book to reread at different stages of your life to appreciate them from a new perspective.

Thank you NetGalley and Astra Publishing House, Astra House for a copy of this ARC to review.

"You have to be afraid to live"

I was so excited for these stories, sadly not all of them lived up to my expectations.

Mouth is a beautiful written collection of strange and otherworldly stories. Some were boring and kind of unneccessary, I know many people will disagree.
They all have something to do with a mouth, more or less. Many of them contain the topic of death in different forms, sometimes strange rituals or portals.
The stories were very intersting and I often found myself wondering how Puloma Ghosh came up with these and from where she got her inspiration.
I don't regret reading this book but I give it overall only 3.75 stars because I'm very divided.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC in exhange for an honest review :)

fruit!!!! weird women and fruit!!! fruit and fertility!!

Mouth is Pulomas debut novel, covering 11 short hypnotic stories. She explores motherhood, girlhood, queer relationships and so much more in such intricate and fascinating ways. she weaved fantasy plots into these stories, which generally im not a massive fan of though still appreciated and enjoyed motherless. i can’t wait to follow along Ghosh’s career!! if you like weird and unsettling stories about women, this one’s for u!!

I didn’t know Puloma Ghosh at all before picking this book on Netgalley, I was just intrigued by the cover art. This “strategy” has sometimes backfired for me in the past, but this time it didn’t. Intriguing might be the right word for the whole collection, because each of the stories was unexpected and strange in some wayd.

Sometimes it’s an alternative world or a dystopia, sometimes it goes into horror territory. It’s often dark, almost always weird. It reminded me of Kelly Link’s stories, but I must confess it’s been a while since I read Link. Ghosh is a young Indian-born American woman, and some stories allude to immigrant experience or travel back to India, but it’s not the main point of these stories.

I enjoyed Leaving things most, as it starts in a town that inhabitants are slowly deserting because of a dark menace around wolves. It’s maybe a werewolf story, but it would be too easy to classify it only like that. Another story I loved is Lemon Boy, a boy that the narrator meets at a party and who tells her about strange holes where people disappear. The Fig Tree is a slightly more traditional haunting story of a young girl who recently lost her mother and is traveling to her native country with her father. The first story of the collection, Desiccation, took me a while to get into, because at first you’d think it’s a realist story of an immigrant girl who is supposed to befriend the only other immigrant girl in town, except that the second girl is… let’s just say uncanny to not spoil anything? and the town they live in is in a world without any adult men.

All stories are very atmospheric, but sometimes I found that what was supposed to happen was a bit too vague for me. It’s been a while I was looking for the right reference that this collection reminded me of, and I finally got it: 2 years ago I read Life Ceremony, a collection of weird short stories by Sayaka Murata. Although Murata’s stories are precise in a very Japanese way, they both share something of surreal mixed with horror. I’m glad I discovered Ghosh and would gladly read other stories by her.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley. I received a free copy of this book for review consideration.

My mind is blown over this incredible debut collection of weird horror! I only wish I had read it with a friend or two to talk out each story, share reactions to the awesome connections and explore the surreal vibes!

The writing is hypnotic and captivating. The relationships between the 11 stories are secretly flawless. Mouths: stories is an instant favourite. Fans of Julia Armfield will love this!

Picking favourites felt easy at first but when I went back to quickly review them, I realized how incredible each of them are for different reasons.

My 5 ⭐️ favs are; Lemon Boy, K, Leaving Things, Natalya and The Fig Tree.

Thank you Netgalley and Astra publishing for ARC in exchange of an honest review.



Mouth

11 Stories by Puloma Ghosh

- **Dessication**

> Ma always told me we had to accept the logic of the world we were given and learn to live in it. Maybe she would have let that logic swallow me like it swallowed my father, his warm hands, the buttons on his cuffs that were once larger than my fingernails.
>
> Our world shrank, but after the initial shock and a few transi-tional years, most people in our town became comfortable. If there was unrest anywhere, we couldn’t see it. Some even argued things became better for women, as the world was seldom good to them before, but that might have been propaganda fed to us by the Bureau. Even as a child, I wondered what was “good” about being left behind.
>

Story of Meghana, an Indian girl in foreign country who's asked by her mother to befriend another Indian girl, Pritha. Pritha is well, something totally unbelievable.

- **The fig tree**

> Ankita sees how a room can be oppressive, how idleness can be hypnotic.
>

Story of a grieving woman Ankita, who comes back to her country for her mother's last burial rituals but Haunted by something beyond her imagination.

- **Leaving things**

> I was born only to become my mother’s silhouette against the oval window of our front door, watching another man walk away.
>

This is story of a vet doc who is living in a small town which has been emptied under government orders as something sinister is happening but she choses to stay and comes across something which is beyond anyone's imagination. This is kind of a story that I will always remember.

- **K**

> There’s a truth, no matter how buried, no matter how many better, more appetizing truths have been spun around it.
>

> I learned the best lies are half- truths.
>

A young girl, an apparition of another girl K that appears in her room often. In her dreams too. There's a mystery and there's something strange that marks the end of the story. Another story which made an impact on me.

- **In the winter**

> In the winter I’m pretty because the loneliness makes my face slack, my eyes intense. There are no stories without loneliness.
>

Is this a werewolf story?? I think it is. Short yet powerful.

- **Anomaly**

> Predictably, humanity couldn’t invent anything without fucking up the environment and commodifying what was left.
>

> You would think the introduction of time travel and extratemporal diplomats and stealthy timeline disrupting agents would give every one a new perspective on life. Our species was allegedly on the cusp of evolution, spies sweeping in from other timelines to influence us, but people were still as corny and boring as ever.
>

This story felt like a black mirror sci fi. If you want to enter anomaly you might come across someone you don't want to but in reality you want to like a confrontation with a dead ex lover.

- **Lemon boy**

> There was something horrific about facing a party alone. It made you both invisible and vulnerable at once.
>

Do you see holes around you? I started seeing few after reading this story.

- **Supergiants**

> Even if I showed up at my own mother’s door, she wouldn’t recognize me. There’s barely anything left of the person who grew in her womb, just a bit of organ tissue, a few nerve endings. I’m so utterly free it’s paralyzing.
>

A popular celebrity but what they lost in the process nobody really knows. There's always a cost for everything.

- **Nip**

> “Colors can feel; that’s why they make us feel. If I love a color enough, it can love me back.”
>

This might be the hardest story to explain. Where to even start? There's something totally unexplainable about this story. I have no words. A story of what complete overt obsession can result into.

- **Natalya**

> “You can’t choose the things you remember, The important things will find you.”
>

> I don’t know if I loved you, yet you linger within me like an appari-tion.
>

> You have to be afraid to live.
>

One of the stories which I liked the most. The protagonist is suicidal, currently performing an autopsy on someone he had relationships in the past - an ex- lover.

- **Persimmons**

> Uma always thought fate was a choice.
>

There's a tree, there's a girl and there's a purpose until only one remains. It is about a girl's coming to terms with what society expects from her.

The stories are eerie, absurd and allegorical and leave an everlasting impression on reader's mind. I would not recommend it to everyone although I totally enjoyed reading them. They have a shock factor as well as some gore which many readers can find uncomfortable to read. In all stories the reality is stretched beyond imagination, the creatures like vampires, werewolves and some even that I'm not able to explain are given life. These short stories explore sexuality, grief and happiness, isolation and loneliness and longing to be with someone you loved and even necrophilia.

Highly recommended who like this kind of gore subjects.

Mouth: Stories takes you effortlessly through different imaginary worlds whose humans and creatures lurk with need and want. Themes of love, loss, grief, and the need to consume; the need to be seen without being perceived. Puloma Ghosh gives characters full-lived lives on these short pages, and with just few words, the idea of understanding one’s self so deeply yet also so deeply out of touch. Each short story left me wanting more yet are so solid, delivering a full-pictured story within one chapter. “In The Winter” was the shortest yet immediately top favorite short story of the bunch, with “Anomaly” coming in close second.
Bordering horror and romance, Mouth: Stories by Puloma Ghosh is truly a must-read work of fiction.

Love that we are getting more weird girl fiction. Every short story is odd, unsettling, and bizarre. Some involved beautiful exploration of vampires, sapphic love, and dystopian I love the way Puloma Ghosh writes about grief, sexuality, and mothering, I found myself re-reading some of the hauntingly beautiful stories in the novel like "Leaving Things" and "K". I can't wait to own the physical copy.
Thank you Netgalley and Astra house. It was a privilege to read this.

“Mouth” is Puloma Ghosh’s debut and consists of 11 surreal, eerie short stories that sometimes even border on horror. Almost all of them are set in dystopian worlds and explore a variety of themes like alienation, mother daughter relationships, (sapphic) love, loneliness, and grief.
If I’m being honest, some of the stories were a little too absurd for my taste and I felt like the author had a lot of ideas and tried to incorporate as many as possible into this collection. While all of the stories are very cohesive, I still think that some could have used more focus on the characters and less on the eerie plot.
Still, I think this is a great, unique debut and I will definitely be checking out Ghosh’s future work.
3.5 stars

My favorite stories were:
Desiccation
Leaving Things
In the Winter
Supergiant
Nip

Thank you, NetGalley and Astra, for providing me with an advanced reader’s copy in exchange for an honest review.

Mouth explores, in eleven short stories, themes of extraneity, loneliness, sexuality and mother-daughter relationships through a supernatural and speculative lens, with a dreamy style, sometimes verging on the tones of unreality.

One of the constants in the work is fruit, and I’ve never seen the word “pith” just as often as I have in these short stories: my literary analysis is not something to be envied, and I failed to grasp the meaning fruit has in the collection. Most of the time it felt like it was there purely out of an aesthetic presence, if not for a reference to bountifulness? Fertility?
What I found really interesting was how the author kept hammering on the idea of becoming monstrous out of a sense of belonging, as opposed to the usual, othering, depiction of monstrosity.

This is the author’s debut work, and as with every short story collection, some works shine more than others: my arc copy didn’t have titles for the individual short stories so I can’t mention them without spoiling them; I enjoyed the third one, where a protagonist takes in a wolf-child in a post-apocalyptic town destroyed by the menace of wolves, and the years old affair told through a lover’s gaze while they perform the autopsy on the body of their old flame.

I think it’s an interesting collection, and despite recognising that the narrative style is not my favourite I really think it could find its audience in fans of Julian K. Jarboe’s Everyone On The Moon Is Essential Personnel and Kate Folk’s Out There.
2.75

Access to the ARC acquired thanks to NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

A surreal and atmospheric collection of short stories. Some notable themes found in these shorts are identity, love, loss, loneliness, and connection.

What I feel differentiates this collection from others on the market is the perspective. This is my first time reading such uncanny stories told from the South Asian diaspora perspective. If I had to describe my taste in books, I would call it “weird girl fic.” As an enthusiast of this genre, it was really cool to see.

Like all collections of short stories, there are some that stand out and some that won’t be your favorite. In regards to the shorts I didn’t enjoy as much, it’s not that I found them bad, but I often found that while I enjoyed the beginning and middle of them, the endings often fell short in comparison to the buildup. Overall, I did enjoy the collection in its entirety. As it is Ghosh’s debut collection, I will definitely look forward to reading more of their work.

Also worth noting, the cover is an absolute stunning work of art.

I loved this collection of strange, often horrifying stories. Each was immensely enjoyable, and I felt drawn into the worlds immediately. If I could think of a connecting thread it would perhaps be loneliness? Though in their strangeness alone there's a connection there. These were great, and I'll read anything Ghosh writes next.

Thanks to the publisher for the e-galley!

THIS. OMG. THIS. I am forever grateful to Astra House Publishing for sending me an advanced copy of Mouth: Stories before it hits shelves on June 11, 2024. I know this is a ways away, but yall need to have like pre-ordered this one YESTERDAY or something because, HOLY FRIGGIN CRAP, that was amazing.

This is Puloma Ghosh's first novel, but you'd hardly be able to tell because the writing is so exquisitely scrumptious, leaving me craving more after every story. There were narratives of all shapes and sizes, covering most sapphic angles and breaching into monstrous territories. Overall, there were continuous themes of Body Horror, and I just ate these stories up. From sacrificial persimmon trees taking first-born daughters, to ghosts of roommates' past coming for a visit, and even vampiric figure skaters taking what they're owed... there's something here for everyone.

PRE-ORDER IT NOW!

Each story in Puloma Ghosh's debut, Mouth, gnawes its way to your brain with its sharp teeth of prose. Sucking you into its dark holes of worlds. Worlds that are a little too bizarre but modernly original. In Natalya, you intimately dissect her cadaver, her warmth once memorized. In Persimmons, you witness a martyr's welcoming embrace for the state of ruination. A dystopia awaits in Leaving Things, raising a boy wolf into a man. These are just three of the eleven mouth-watering stories of surrealism, queerness, grief, and sometimes ambiguous loss. Truly a feast of tangy endings.

I don’t normally tend to gravitate towards short stories and I find myself asking questions and not getting into the story by the time it ends but these 11 short stories all felt very fleshed out and descriptive. These were all creepy, dystopian and captivating in the best way and I’ll definitely be reading future work by this author!

I included this wonderful collection in a round-up article on books I am looking forward to in 2024 at Michigan Quarterly Review. Here is what I wrote about it:

"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. It presents us with ghosts, bottled infatuation, teen figure skaters with a necrophilic bend, and a story in the form of an autopsy report. All while interrogating lies, truth, and what is real in the vivid description that brings the world Ghosh creates alive."

hooooly moly, new fav alert!!!

I was utterly obsessed w/ this collection of stories. these stories were dark, weird, captivating, sapphic and surreal. I kept being so satisfied with each story, waiting to lose interest as the stories progressed, and I never did! I loved the topics explored, a lot of magical realism, grief, heartache, and dystopian themes. seriously devoured this and will devour anything else ghosh puts out into the world. a seriously incredible debut <3

thank you net galley and astra house! I will be thinking + talking about this one for a while.

Mouth by Puloma Ghosh contains eleven short stories that explore themes from vampiric entities to mysterious spaces in between reality. I loved this reading experience, each story was very well written and incredibly unique, I can happily say i’ve never read anything like it and am stunned that it’s this authors debut! My favourite stories from this collection were Persimmons and Anomaly!
Highly recommend picking this up when it releases on the eleventh of june 2024.
Thank you to Astra Publishing House and Netgalley for the ARC!