Chrysalis is a short story collection by Anuja Varghese that is fresh, evocative, poetic, scary, affirming, weird, and just about any other adjective you can think of. It’s a book that makes you want to talk about it. For example, a friend came over and I handed her my kindle and told her to pick a story, any story. I knew she would find it thrilling and disturbing. She happened to pick one of the more horrific stories, but still loved it because how can you not?

Varghese’s prose has a spare, but descriptive, quality that is poetic, not in the flowery poetry of Wordsworth, but more like Fernando Pessoa. Reading Chrysalis made me think of these lines, “The poet is a man who feigns / And feigns so thoroughly, at last / He manages to feign as pain / The pain he really feels.” These stories are fantastical, true magic realism, but she succeeds where many fail in making us feel the pain.

One of the first stories, The Vetala’s Song, lets everyone know this book is going to be weird in the sense of Lovecraft, though an anti-racist subversion of Lovecraft. It is perhaps my favorite story in the collection. Chitra is a very tongue-in-cheek and not the least bit subtle retelling of Cinderella’s story, but it escapes the predictability of most Cinderella stories. Stories in the Language of the Fist could perhaps be a seminar in microaggressions. Midnight at the Oasis was both heartbreaking and affirming.

Chrysalis is my favorite book of 2023. The language is lovely. The emotions, the pain and the joy, feel authentic. The people are more complex than one expects in a short story. There is this authentic weight to the stories, of alienation, pain, love, grief, all blended into a beautiful whole.

I received a copy of Chrysalis from the publisher through Edelweiss.