About this Event
Join us on Saturday, October 3rd at 4pm as we host Meghana Mysore in conversation with Meher Manda to discuss her new story collection, Let All Our Ghosts Depart. Signed copies of the book will be available for purchase.
About the book:
In Meghana Mysore's debut short story collection, present-day women and girls of the South Asian diaspora grapple with belonging and are haunted by intergenerational inheritances. Mysore, herself the daughter of Indian immigrants, spins her stories around narrators struggling to assimilate into the surreal world around them. In the world of these stories, ghosts are real--in “Repair Shop,” dead mothers reappear as chiding, broken-down cars; in “Hoarder,” the narrator’s ex-lovers transform into scarves that won't let her go. In another story, a daughter, trapped inside her grief, spends her days Face Timing with her dead father, watching him become a young man she never knew.
At turns absurd and darkly humorous, and sometimes speculative, Mysore’s stories touch on real-life experiences of intergenerational trauma, womanhood, the fluidity of desire and longing, and coming home to one’s body. Her characters have faced violences small and large, holding losses that bind them to their pasts and weigh them down in daily life. Each of these stories contains an experience of transformation, be it small or monumental for these women, who find spaces of freedom and delight within their circumstances.
About the author:
Meghana Mysore’s stories, essays, and poems have appeared in The Hopkins Review, The Yale Review, The Massachusetts Review, The Audacity, and more. She is the winner of the Barry Hannah Prize in Fiction. Mysore has been a Steinbeck Fellow and a scholar at McCormack Writing Center and Bread Loaf. She holds an MFA from Hollins University and a BA in English from Yale. Mysore has taught as visiting faculty at Amherst College and Bucknell University, and is assistant professor of English and creative writing at Randolph College in central Virginia. She is a fan of non-sequiturs and used bookstores, and hails from Portland, Oregon.
About the moderator:
Meher Manda is a writer of poetry, fiction, and culture criticism from Bombay, India, currently stationed in Providence, RI. Her work has been published in The Margins, Los Angeles Review, Catapult, epiphany, and elsewhere. Sicko Girl & Other Women is her debut short story collection, forthcoming in 2027 from Feminist Press in the US and Penguin Random House in India. A Town Like Every Other, her debut graphic novel, is forthcoming from Hachette in 2027. She is the Editor-at-Large at Radix and teaches at the Rhode Island School of Design. Her writing wrestles with the tensions that splinter the self from state / woman from body / singular from spectacle / guttural from ordinary.
Event venue & nearby stays
Symposium Books, 240 Westminster Street, Providence, United States
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