I’m keeping an eye out for more work from Puloma Ghosh after this. The curse of short story collections is how hit or miss they can be but there are strong elements I loved even in the stories I was less fond of. Would love to read a full novel by Ghosh in the future! Highly recommended for fans of “weird books for weird girls” booktok heads. 3.75 ⭐️
Thank you to NetGalley and Astra House for the e-ARC!

This short story collection portrays the various experiences of womanhood in raw and vulnerable ways. Ghosh does a lovely job of crafting diverse stories, characters, and character experiences, all while staying consistent with the theme of womanhood. Many of these stories take a deep dive into female friendships, romantic relationships, and family relationships.

The strongest stories are “Leaving Things”, “Lemon Boy”, and “Natalya”. In “Leaving Things”, a woman living in a dystopian small town finds a wolf who, before dying, gives birth to a half human half wolf boy. In “Lemon Boy” the protagonist searches for an anchor in her life and meets a boy at a party, Lemon Boy, who tells her about his ex and the holes she sees. “Natalya” depicts an intimate and vulnerable autopsy of an ex lover.

Ghosh’s collection is strong and succinct. One critique I can offer is the repetition of shedding skin or inhabiting a set of skin. Though, if the collection is examined from a feminist perspective, the inhabiting and shedding of skin certainly makes sense and offers a great critique of modern womanhood.

This was a really solid collection of stories! Very weird, often queer, and beautifully veering from literary into speculative fiction. I enjoyed reading these stories, my favorites being Lemon Boy, Persimmons, In the Winter, and Natalya. The descriptions in these stories really take you in using all five senses, especially (as the title suggests) taste. Highly recommend.

wow! puloma ghosh's debut book consists of eleven chilling stories that explore themes such as love, sexuality, grief and longing. i have had my eyes on this book for some time and had the honor of getting to read it earlier than its release date (june 11, 2024). each story had me in shock and sometimes really creeped out; my favorite being "the fig tree". really enjoyed the nuances of the characters in the stories and how much wonder this book had me feeling. if you're into horror and into tales with chilling twists this book is for you! i'm thinking of adding this one to my physical library

I'm absolutley here for the weird and wonderful - and this one definitely landed in that category! A disturbing collection of short stories and a brilliant debut! Thank you to netgalley and the publishers for the EARC x

Thank you NetGalley and AstraHouse Books for this eARC copy of Mouth, out June 11 2024

Mouth is a collection of 11 short stories featuring dystopian, sci-fi elements along with queer exploration & horror that leaves you hungry for more. Puloma Ghosh creates these small worlds where young women engage in their every dark desire, we meet a man haunted by his dead ex, couples traveling through rips in time and werewolves seeking out mothers.

Each story is such a unique experience and there were moments that truly shocked me but I was mesmerized from the start. Ghosh’s writing style has this gentle lull but underneath is a darkness I absolutely enjoyed exploring.

Finished this yesterday but was on a plane and exhausteddddd so never reviewed. These were really cool this second queer short story collection i’ve read this week but this was more fantastical and i actually really liked that. i’m normally not a fantasy person or short story person so it was a pleasant surprise. thought the story about the holes was the strongest but there were so many cool ideas explored here!

thank you to netgalley and astra for the arc!

Well, I think perhaps this might have been a little too bizarre for me- I felt like there was a lot left unexplained.
Leaving Things was my fave - perhaps because it had the most linear structure and was easier to understand.
I loved the writing style, but most of the stories didn’t really do it for me.

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.

The stories that are sticking with me the most from this are the last story (Persimmons, about a sacrifice), and the second to last story, Natalya, which marries a love story with an autopsy of a corpse in a really fantastically woven story. This is the first I've heard from this author, and just from what I've seen here, I'm absolutely interested in what she does in the future.

I love this darkly beautiful, sensual, and evil collection of stories more than any words can describe. I sank my teeth into each one like something to savor and swallowed it whole. Ghosh's writing is masterful, haunting, and composes a thin line between language that breathes a life all its own: taut and breezy, yet hopeful and horrifying. I fell in love with this collection from the first story and shed tears as I completed the last. It met me in the hidden, shadowed parts of myself and made itself at home inside me. These characters and their motives understood me, and their hungers were mine and mine theirs. It was my tongue that tasted the ripe fruits-sweet and tart saccharine juices, and rotted pulp hidden within. My lips that pressed both firmly and gently into the mouths of secret lovers, tongue sweetened and fortified by desire and emptiness. Love, and the lack of it. The prose and lyricism of this collection rears down sharper than a knife. I had several favorites, which were as follows (in no particular order): 𝘋𝘦𝘴𝘴𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯, 𝘓𝘦𝘢𝘷𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘛𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨𝘴, 𝘒, 𝘐𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘞𝘪𝘯𝘵𝘦𝘳, 𝘓𝘦𝘮𝘰𝘯 𝘉𝘰𝘺, 𝘕𝘢𝘵𝘢𝘭𝘺𝘢, and 𝘗𝘦𝘳𝘴𝘪𝘮𝘮𝘰𝘯𝘴. All were incredible, however, and left my mind and heart reeling in new understanding and wanting more. My own mouth had fed of them. I tasted the darkness hidden there and swallowed every bite, and yet I remain both seen and unseen, like Ghosh's characters. My desire is true, and now I am sure of it.

I am more hungry than I've ever been.

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.