Hello angels,
I met Puloma at our MFA program in Vermont - it was January of 2020 and we were both outside of the campus center where I think ‘prom’ was happening. It was so cold and we were drunk and I liked Puloma’s energy immediately: an Aries with strong opinions who was clearly fucking smart and very well read. I wouldn’t read her writing for a few months when we were briefly in a writing group together (shout out to Kaycie and Alex, the other members) and when I did, I was like fuck. I had no doubt at all that she would sell her book, and when she did sell Mouth of course I was freaking out but I was also like, yeah.
Puloma’s writing is eerie and unsettling, horny and gorgeous, spooky and textured. This January, we drove back to Vermont and in the darkest part of the drive she read aloud for me a story about a haunted dorm room (inspired by a nightmare she had at Bennington) and I was so creeped out (compliment) that I had a hard time falling asleep. I mean it when I say I love every story in Mouth, Puloma’s debut collection with Astra - but I particularly love “Lemon Boy” which I read initially in our writing group (!) and “Anomaly” which was published in no tokens this spring. and I’m so happy that she sent “short stories for freaks besides Kelly Link and Carmen Maria Machado”. I have been saying that Puloma’s writing is for anyone who loved Her Body and Other Parties but…. Okay, I’m gonna say it!! Better!!!
Okay, here is Puloma who has great taste - basically every book she tells me to read I say yes ma’am.
Puloma in one of my tank tops. Unfair to be both this hot and talented but fine.
The Houseguest — Amparo Dávila
Amparo Dåvila is an award-winning Mexican author, but this collection remains the only selection of her work that’s been translated to English, decades after she first published. This collection is loud and surreal. Dávila is deft at weaving stories within stories, characters telling each other strange tales, making the work a nesting doll of bizarreness. I can’t forget the one about the woman who is being stalked but also turns into a toad? Can someone please translate more of her work?! Thank you!!!
Note from Ariél: Puloma shared these pics in the google doc for me but I’m sharing it with you too because come on I’m not a monster
Yoko Ogawa is one of my favorite authors, and this linked collection is something I’ve read and reread. Each story picks up with a minor character from the last. Ogawa’s writing is clean and beautiful, but this tranquil prose contains quietly disturbing stories full of obsession and death. My favorite is “Sewing for the Heart,” in which a bag maker must construct a bag to protect the beating organ of a woman whose heart is on the outside of her body.
Venus in the Blind Spot — Junji Ito
This is a graphic novel, but if you love freaky things and have the stomach for these visuals, reading Ito is a must. He’s a master of body horror and absurdity who churns out short horror comics. He writes beautiful and terrifying women who unravel the characters around them. Not every story will hit, but when it does you’ll be like “What the fuck did I just read” but in the best way. This collection has the very famous “The Enigma of Amigara Fault,” and I also personally loved “The Licking Woman,” which is literally just about this woman with a really nasty tongue who stalks the alleys licking unsuspecting strangers… it’s disgusting, incredible.
Octavia Butler is known mostly for her novels, but her short stories are killer. This collection is her only one, and it takes you to faraway worlds, dystopian futures, disturbing family histories. The titular story starts the collection with a bang—insectile parasites, men impregnated when they come of age. As a writer what I love about the collection is that each story is accompanied by a short essay by Butler about what her thoughts and process were in creating it. I’m always awestruck by her imagination.
Terminal Boredom — Izumi Suzuki
Each of Suzuki’s stories present a unique science fiction premise, experienced by irreverent women who are tired of the world, its rules, its men. She was an influential science fiction writer in Japan before her untimely death by suicide at 36. All her visions of the future and the possibilities of technology and humanity are grim, but she manages to maintain some levity with bold protagonists and a conversational, sarcastic tone. The story that stands out to me most is “That Old Seaside Club,” in which the characters navigate a dreamy other planet, where they can reset and reset their lives in order to work through their mental issues and are ready to return to Earth. My favorite lines read, “I open the curtains slightly to look outside. A new day – fresh and luminous – is already starting. I imagine I’ll head back to Earth eventually. Once I manage to let go completely. I no longer care about happiness or unhappiness. I just hope the scenery’s pretty, wherever I am.”
The foreword of this book feels like a short story in itself, about how Molinard would write ferociously everyday and then destroy all the pages, and this book is all that her friend Marguerite Duras could pry out of her fingers and send to a publisher. It’s clear from the work that this author did not write to be read, she wrote to live. Her stories will made me feel a little bit unwell. Many of them start out in a world like our own and tilt quickly into a thin, murky place where a woman can love a headless man, houses can suck people in, and a character can end up as a body lying still on the ground, entangled in a snake. Of all my recommendations, I find this collection the most disturbing. The stories are surreal and deeply, deeply unsettling in a way I can’t explain. You will just have to trust me and read them. The last story, “The Vault” is one the author found herself unable to write, so they published a transcript of Duras interviewing her about it. It left me with a chill I couldn’t shake for days.
The Dangers of Smoking in Bed — Mariana Enríquez
You cannot be a freaky fiction enthusiast without reading Mariana Enríquez. Her stories are full of witchy, dangerous, horny women. There is a constant sense of fear and dread underpinning all of her stories, plagued with disappearances, dark fetishes, and mutilation. She is a lover of horror and pays homage to classic elements of the genre—curses, ghosts, Ouija boards—reimagined mostly in Buenos Aires, haunted by its political history. The ones I’ve read over and over are “The Well,” a very tight story about the fear we inherit, and “Our Lady of the Quarry,” told in first person plural, from the perspective of a group of vicious teenage girls.
Ling Ma kicked down the door with Severance and her short stories are equally awesome. They’re readable, complicated, and she writes uncanny and speculative work exactly the way I hope to—the weirdness is there, the fantastical elements are interesting, but there’s so much more to it than that. To name a few favorites: “Peking Duck,” has a daughter reckoning with the way memory is subjective, and how we fill in the narrative for our parents for things we didn’t understand as children. “After Hours” follows a grad student finding a mysterious portal in the office of a professor she admired and maybe loved, and “Returning” takes a woman back to her husband’s homeland for an uncanny ritual. All of the stories manage to walk that tightrope of unexpected and relatable.
Thank you SO much Puloma - I love your brain and your Mouth. The second I hit send on this I will be purchasing all of the books that I don’t already have - looking at you, Panics and Revenge, especially. I have recommended The Dangers of Smoking in Bed before which was originally recommended to be by Puloma - Mariana Hive, etc.
I’m reading Jackie Under My Skin by Wayne Koestenbaum as research which is truly blowing my mind and I just did the audiobook of Tampa by Alissa Nutting which was so disturbing and brilliant and made me so uncomfortable and anxious I had to stress text my friend Marian about it who said, accurately, “She’s soooooo crazy” about the narrator.
I would also urge you to read this essay “Stone and Seed” in Vittles by Mira Mattar on starvation in Gaza and this gutting op-ed by Hala Alyan in on becoming numb to Gaza’s destruction in The Guardian. I continue to bedazzle as a fundraiser for families evacuating Gaza - please DM me on Instagram to order your own or email me here! If you have any audiobook recs, I’d love to hear them.
I hope that this week brings you a gorgeous view of the moon, a reason to wear that thing you’ve been wanting to wear, a letter from someone you love. Oh, also get your COVID booster and flu shots! I got mine on Sunday and the only side effect I’m experiencing is being gay.
Talk soon!
Kisses,
Ariél