Mouth

April 29, 2024
Ghosh debuts with a satisfying speculative collection about grief and desire. In “Desiccation,” an Indian American teen named Meghna falls for the only other Indian girl on her figure skating team, whom she suspects of being a vampire. “The Fig Tree” follows a married woman who returns from the U.S. to her birthplace of Kolkata to scatter her mother’s ashes. There, she glimpses a ghostly woman and wonders if her mother has returned. In “Leaving Things,” wolves overrun a city and devour the women. Afterward, a lonely survivor shelters a wolf baby, unsure what will happen when it grows up. “Lemon Boy” and “Natalya” explore the consequences of revisiting past relationships through the stories of protagonists confronted by the ghosts of their ex-lovers. Some of the shorter entries feel underdeveloped, but for the most part, Ghosh sharply draws the contours of her invented worlds and evokes her characters’ insatiable desires with vibrant imagery (“The whole apartment had turned into a gaping mouth, the wax its saliva pooling on the dining table”). These stories effectively sustain a sense of the uncanny. Agent: Angeline Rodriguez, WME.

May 1, 2024
In Ghosh's debut short-story collection, mouths gnaw, bite, and tear. In "Leaving Things," a human baby tears itself from the stomach of a dying wolf, leaving the vet who found her at a loss; in "Nip," a woman drinks her lover down like honey; in "Anomaly," rips in time appear around the world, and two people decide to go through one on their first date. The blood, guts, and consumption are tangled with sex and an inexplicable, animal kind of desire, all set against images of cold (ice rinks, northern chill, corpses) and the background machinations of greedy, opaque dystopian governments or corporations. Ghosh's stories are all about an at-once intangible and gory hunger, whether it's the sharp, queer romance between two teen ice dancers in "Desiccation" or the way the protagonist of "Supergiant" lets a company hollow her out in order to be a pop star, if only for a time. While some of the tales are only provocative without a convincing narrative core, Ghosh's stories reveal a promising, jagged new literary voice.

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May 15, 2024
The mundane and the extraordinary mesh into new and fascinating shapes in this debut story collection. Ghosh mixes ordinary events with fantastical and ominous realities. In "Desiccation," a young figure skater has a flirtation with a vampire on the rink while her mother struggles with her job in a government that disappears young men who reach a certain age. A woman decides to get back on dating apps now that the time war has ended and winds up going through a tear in space and time on a first date in "Anomaly." Life in Ghosh's stories runs the gamut from odd but close to normal, as in "Natalya," which takes the form of an autopsy report performed by the dead woman's ex-partner, to the fantastical, as in "Persimmons," in which a young girl comes to terms with her fate as the future sacrifice of her small community of space colonists. Each story is tinged with queer themes, most of the protagonists either lesbian or bisexual, and many feature the protagonists' Indian heritage, as in "The Fig Tree," in which a woman travels to India with her father to spread her mother's ashes. Ghosh's tales push at the limits of comfort, as what seems understandable suddenly morphs into the bizarre. There's a sensuality to them all that usually works though sometimes feels added simply for the sake of it. As they run the gamut from slightly strange to almost metaphysical, not all the stories will necessarily connect with readers, but when one hits, it will linger. 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.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.