In Let All Our Ghosts Depart, the debut short story collection by Meghana Mysore, readers follow women and girls of the South Asian diaspora who grapple with belonging, intergenerational trauma, and the surreal inheritances that shape their lives. Blending the speculative with the emotionally intimate, Mysore’s stories follow characters haunted by grief, desire, family, and memory as they search for freedom, transformation, and a sense of self in worlds at once absurd and deeply familiar.
Let All Our Ghosts Depart will be published on September 1, 2026, by West Virginia University Press.
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.
Debutiful is honored to reveal the cover of Let All Our Ghosts Depart, which was designed by Elisha Zepeda, along with a Q&A with Mysore about its creation.
While writing the book, did you have any ideas for what you wanted the cover to look like?
Not consciously, but subconsciously. When writing these stories, I had the image of a girl in my mind, a girl kind of like I used to be. I was writing to her, perhaps, this brown girl who dreamed a lot, who believed fiercely in stories, whose voice wavered, who sought to understand the violence and the beauty of the world. The word that comes to mind when I think about these stories together is expansiveness. So often, we are pigeonholed into representations of how we’re supposed to be, based on certain identity markers, and when I think of expansiveness, I think of the women and girls in these stories who are often contradicting themselves, are often unruly, are angry and sad and joyful and everything in between; they take up space. As a girl, for many reasons, taking up space is what I had trouble doing. I wanted to see a cover that depicted this girl in some way, and that would capture this largeness. I was also thinking of my hair and the hair of many South Asian women in my family—it’s thick! It’s large! It’s un-brushable sometimes. It’s wavy and full of life. I wanted a cover that pointed in many directions and felt full of life.
Can you explain what the design process was like once you started working with your publishing team?
Early in the process, I offered some thoughts to my publisher about cover color schemes and design ideas. I’d seen some covers that I really loved that I mentioned to them as examples—among them, When We Were Sisters by Fatimah Asghar, and Let’s Go Let’s Go Let’s Go by Cleo Qian. The covers I was really drawn to depicted women facing each other, floating, reflecting one another, speaking to each other in some way. I loved the surreal atmosphere of Qian’s cover, and the blue color scheme. I was digging through some family photos, and found images of me and my sister just dancing around, and one of us walking on the beach in Florence, Oregon when I was almost four and my sister was seven. I loved the playfulness in this image, and I wanted the cover to have this feeling of joy and playfulness when so many of the characters in my book are weighed down by the pain of gendered violence, of their pasts. But within this pain they’re also reaching towards transformations, towards the other side of darkness.
I then saw some cover comps for designs by the brilliant Elisha Zepeda, and they ranged in tone and feeling, all of them revealing different important parts of the collection. I’m thrilled that my publisher and I agreed on the designs that felt most right for the book, and that they settled on the one that I also loved the most.
What was it like seeing your finalized cover for the first time?
I was so emotional. This cover is very personal for me because it comes from the aforementioned photo of me and my sister at the beach in Oregon when we were kids. It definitely has an eerie tone to it, and I think blurring out our faces and heads also makes the cover feel more universal (in addition to a little unsettling). I feel the dreaminess and the surrealism that is a part of many of these stories in the design, the sense of something slightly askew. In many cases, it’s a new angle that allows my characters tiny freedoms and everyday delights. Thinking of what the picture depicts—playing on the beach as a kid with my sister—I come back to this feeling of just being free, not thinking of anything, and just laughing. Many of the women in my stories are searching for this freedom, but their playfulness is interrupted by interpersonal or societal violences. The experience of freedom interrupted also comes through in the cover with the blurring of our faces. But still, the joy and the playfulness are not diminished, and can be returned to. I hope my stories assert this. I aim for my characters and stories to feel multifaceted, to be sad and tender and strange and humorous, and this cover holds all these tones beautifully. It’s strangely beautiful, and I hope my readers experience the book this way, like a dream that awakens you to something in real life you didn’t know was there.
How does the cover work to convey what the book is all about?
I really love the poems of Hua Xi, and one of them, “Everything Lies in All Directions,” stays in my mind. In it, she writes, “Everything beautiful lay both forwards and backwards./Everything translated into butterflies, which billowed/into a breath of tall summer. They blew out of the past/and into a future. Was it yours or was it mine?/Then, I was a child. Once, my mother was./This is how you learn that nothing ends/unless it has to.” I write a lot about inheritance, about what is passed from one generation to the next, particularly in my context of being a daughter of immigrants from India. I’m fascinated by how we communicate and the part that language plays in this, and also non-verbal forms of speaking. I’m fascinated by what we can say and what we don’t say to one another across time and space. I think about touching my ajji’s hand and my thatha’s when I’m visiting them in India, and I feel this movement across time, like I can access, for a flickering moment, who they were when they were children, like I can feel myself and who I might be when my hands resemble theirs. I can touch and feel their histories and the sense of places they’ve been to and are going to on their skin—and I can’t know all of this, of course, but I know when I see them, when we speak, in half-English, half-Kannada, that we’re part of a circular story. I know that distance and language separate us, but there is a point at which my voice and the voices of my ancestors are saying the same thing. A point at which our voices merge, and when I can feel that I’m walking forwards and backwards in time, on a beach like this one, and my ancestors are walking away from and towards me. The color blue and the beach on the cover unlock an otherworldly space, where we can exist together, and be children and grandparents and parents and mothers and teenagers all at once. We can hold the selves we were and move towards the selves we’re becoming, and this is what I’m trying to say, as I make my way through the sand and give this book to you.