Book Launch: "Let All Our Ghosts Depart" with Meghana Mysore
7 – 8:30PM
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 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 an incoming assistant professor of English and creative writing at Randolph College in central Virginia.
ABOUT THE CONVERSATION PARTNER:
Karen E. Bender is the author of the story collection Refund, published by Counterpoint Press in 2015; it was a Finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction, and it was also on the shortlist for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Prize. It was also a Los Angeles Times bestseller. All three of her collections–Refund, The New Order, and The Words of Dr. L–were Longlisted for the Story Prize. The Words of Dr. L was one of Kirkus Reviews’ 100 Best Books of 2025. She’s also the author of the novels Like Normal People, (Houghton Mifflin) which was a Los Angeles Times bestseller, a Washington Post Best Book of the Year, and a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, and A Town of Empty Rooms (Counterpoint Press).