“ANOMALY”: A Multimedia Book Release Celebration of Puloma Ghosh’s MOUTH!

Co-presented by Skylight Books

The Philosophical Research Society, in partnership with Skylight Books, welcomes Puloma Ghosh and Melissa Ferrari – and invites you to experience "ANOMALY," a multimedia literary reading, to celebrate the summer 2024 release of Ghosh's short story collection, MOUTH.

Debut author Puloma Ghosh will read the short story, "Anomaly" from her collection, Mouth, accompanied by an animation screening and lantern performance by animation filmmaker, magic lanternist, and 2024 PRS Contributing Artist Melissa Ferrari. The performance will be followed by a conversation with writer, comedian, and podcaster, Jamie Loftus.

Skylight Books will be on hand with copies of MOUTH for sale, available for signing by the author. Join us for this special multimedia evening as we welcome a bold and electrifying new literary voice!

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.

MOUTH has been praised as a "satisfying speculative collection" (Publishers Weekly). showing "incredible range, imagination and depth of feeling" (Kirkus Reviews), with "evocative prose and a sense of urgency that are sure to leave a mark" (Chicago Review of Books). It has been listed as recommended reading by Los Angeles Times, Chicago Review of Books, BookRiot, LitHub, Service95, Reactor Mag, OurCulture, and Debutiful.

About MAGIC LANTERNS

The magic lantern is a device that uses glass slides to create projected images and animations. Invented in the 17th-century, magic lanterns became a widespread form of entertainment throughout the 18th-19th centuries, particularly in Europe, Japan and North America. Popular lantern performances included illustrated lectures, comical animation sequences, and short stories. One of the most legendary lantern shows was the Phantasmagoria, a form of horror theater that used hidden mobile magic lanterns to project monstrous or supernatural specters into smokey screens.

PULOMA GHOSH is the author of the short story collection, Mouth (Astra House, 2024). Her work has appeared in One Story, Book of the Month's VOLUME Ø, No Tokens, CRAFT, Cutleaf, and Cake Zine. Her stories have won the CRAFT Flash Fiction Contest, received honorable mention for the Zoetrope: All-Story Short Fiction Competition and the Ploughshares Emerging Writers Contest, and placed as finalist for the New Letters Robert Day Award for Fiction and Meridian Editor’s Prize. She has received fellowships from the Tin House Summer Workshop and Bennington College, where she received her M.F.A.. She lives in Chicago.

MELISSA FERRARI is an experimental animator, nonfiction filmmaker, magic lanternist and educator who seeks to acquaint folklores of the past with contemporary culture. In exposing peripheral histories, she aims to unveil the wonder that lies in the shadow of nonfiction, rather than fiction. Originally from Virginia, Melissa is now based in Los Angeles where she received an Experimental Animation M.F.A. from CalArts. Her films and magic lantern performances have been shown internationally in venues such as Hot Docs, Hauser & Wirth LA, Ottawa International Animation Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, UnionDocs, and The Exploratorium.

JAMIE LOFTUS is a comedian and writer who wrote the bestselling book Raw Dog: The Naked Truth About Hot Dogs last year. She’s written for Star Trek: Lower Decks and Teenage Euthanasia and makes an embarrassing number of podcasts.

Please email [email protected] or phone 323-663-2167 with any questions.

ACCESSIBILITY

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Host or Publisher The Philosophical Research Society