Join AAWW in-person and online for a celebration of Aruni Kashyap’s short story collection The Way You Want to Be Loved and Puloma Ghosh’s short story collection Mouth! Aruni and Puloma will be joined by writer Nur Nasreen Ibrahim, who will moderate their conversation following their readings.
About Mouth
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.
About The Way You Want to Be Loved
In agile and frank prose, The Way You Want to Be Loved tells the stories of queer, displaced lives from India’s Northeast, an underrepresented region in English fiction. A hybrid cast of characters represents the common people in these thirteen stories, whether western-trained academic or village sorcerer, army soldier or local politician, homeward-bound son or dutiful daughter-in-law. They wrestle with diasporic melancholia, the social pressures of familial duty, and the search for their own personhood, even as they live in a world where personhood is continually compromised and reshaped under oppressive forces larger than themselves. Aruni Kashyap offers up a powerful critique of the malfunctioning democracies of India and the US, deftly balancing devastation and tragedy with a darkly humorous tone that has readers questioning their laughter.
At its core, The Way You Want to Be Loved explores what it means to love, desire, and long for life under the duress of everyday and state-sanctioned violence and discrimination.
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Aruni Kashyap is the author of The Way You Want to be Loved (Gaudy Boy 2024), the novels The House With a Thousand Stories (Penguin 2013), and How to Date a Fanatic (Harper Via 2026) . Along with editing a collection of stories called How to Tell the Story of an Insurgency, he translated two novels from Assamese to English, published by Zubaan Books and Penguin Random House. Recipient of a Harvard Radcliffe Fellowship, the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Faculty Research Grants in the Humanities and Arts Program, the Arts Lab Faculty Fellowship, and the Charles Wallace India Trust Scholarship for Creative Writing to the University of Edinburgh, his poetry collection, There is No Good Time for Bad News, was nominated for the 58th Georgia Author of the Year Awards 2022, a finalist for the Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize, and the Four Way Books Levis Award in Poetry. His translations have been nominated for the Armory Square Prize for South Asian Literature in Translation 2023 and VOW Book Awards 2024. His short stories, poems, and essays have appeared in Catapult, Bitch Media, The Boston Review, Electric Literature, The Oxford Anthology of Writings from Northeast, The Kenyon Review, The New York Times, The Guardian UK, and others. He also writes in Assamese and is the author of a novel called Noikhon Etia Duroit and three novellas. He is an Associate Professor of English & Creative Writing and the Director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Georgia, Athens.
Puloma Ghosh is a fiction writer based in Chicago whose work has appeared in One Story, CRAFT Literary, Cutleaf, and other publications. Mouth is her first book.
Nur Nasreen Ibrahim is a journalist, television producer, and writer from Lahore, Pakistan. Her speculative fiction, literary fiction, and personal essays have been published by The Aleph Review, Salmagundi, and Barrelhouse and anthologized in collections from Harper Perennial, Catapult, Hachette India, and Platypus Press. She is a senior editor with the South Asian Avant-Garde (SAAG) Anthology and a two-time finalist for The Salam Award for Imaginative Fiction. Nur is a recipient of the 2021-2023 Lighthouse Writers Workshop Book Project Teaching Fellowship and the AAWW Margins Fellowship.
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COMMUNITY CARE & ACCESSIBILITY
At AAWW, the safety and comfort of our community is our top priority. We invite you to practice intentionality and care in your behavior and language when engaging with our programs and with each other. Violence of any kind, including but not limited to racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, ageism, class or casteism, bigotry or bias toward religion or faith, or any action or assault against marginalized identities, is not tolerated. Those who bring harm to our community in person or online are not welcome, and will be asked to exit the space.
The event will be live streamed on Zoom with auto captioning for those who cannot join us in person. For those joining us in person, we are located on the 6th floor of 112 W 27th Street (between 6th and 7th Avenues), there is an elevator that will take you directly to our office. To protect our friends with chemical sensitivities, AAWW is a fragrance-free space. Masks are required for audience members for all AAWW events; if you forget yours, one will be provided for you. We have three commercial grade air purifiers, and a quiet room in the back should you need some space from the crowd. We highly encourage all in person guests to take a COVID test at home prior to the event. If you have had COVID or have had known contact with someone who has tested positive for COVID in the 10 days prior, we ask you tune in for the live stream instead. Please reach out to msaleh@aaww.org for additional accessibility requests, including ADA accessible bathrooms, chairs with added back support, and beyond. This space is for YOU!