CHRYSALIS

Anuja Varghese's CHRYSALIS, a poetic, sensual, and surreal debut story collection that challenges traditional frames of South Asian diaspora writing. Drawing on folklore, fairy tale, gothic horror, and magical realism, these genre-blending stories take aim at the ways in which racialized women are robbed of power and revel in the strange and dangerous journeys they undertake to reclaim it.

A couple in a crumbling marriage faces divine intervention. A woman dies in her dreams again and again until she finds salvation in an unexpected source. A teenage misfit discovers a darkness lurking just beyond the borders of her suburban home. For readers of Leone Ross, Kelly Link, Brenda Peynado, and Carmen Maria Machado, CHRYSALIS is by turns poignant and chilling, blurring the lines between the monstrous and the mundane.

Shaped by her own experiences as a queer woman of colour, Anuja Varghese's writing delves into complex intersections of family, community, sexuality, and cultural expectation through an unapologetically feminist lens. We're so excited to be publishing her debut collection with stories that have been recognized in the PRISM International Short Fiction Contest and the Alice Munro Festival Short Story Competition, and nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Her writing has also appeared in Hobart, the Malahat Review, the Fiddlehead, Plenitude Magazine, and others. She lives in Hamilton, Ontario.