Amarisa’s Cooking Pot: Tales of Life in All Its Wonders is a riveting collection whose worlds collide and connect between the fantastic and the ordinary. Startling in their breadth and depth, these stories range from the quietly desperate to the gloriously fantastical, representing Mexican American culture among the characters who are guided by gifts of enchantment or confronted with illusory events shaped by deeply human and enlightening emotions.

Each story is dedicated to capturing something ineffable, an emotional truth, a moment of beauty or realization, a moment of calm, or a spark of fury. What does it mean to be alive in a capricious world? Désirée Zamorano allows readers to explore this question beautifully, and memorably, long after the last page is turned.

Los Angeles native Désirée Zamorano is the author of the groundbreaking historical novel, Dispossessed, as well as the highly acclaimed literary novel, The Amado Women. An award-winning and Pushcart prize–nominated short story writer, Zamorano’s work explores where cultures collide and connect. A selection of her work can be found in Alta, The Kenyon Review Online, and Akashic’s South Central Noir. She teaches linguistic and cultural diversity at California State University Long Beach and is a senior fiction editor at Silk Road Review.