Inside you’ll find stories published only in hard-copy journals, like “Caperucita Roja,” a retelling of Little Red Riding Hood, “Cookies,” with its connection to Día de los Muertos, and “Flight,” my version of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale, “The Twelve Swans.”
Amarisa’s Cooking Pot is out on June 3, 2026!
Reviews
How deft, vibrant, and heartfelt these stories are. I love the way they slip, subtly, from quiet domesticity to magic, then back again; I love even more how often the conduit for those shifts is a perfectly imagined mundane detail, such as an inherited cooking pot or a mother’s shed strands of hair. And when these stories offer glimpses of wonder, they do so in order to give Zamorano’s characters justice that the world denies them.
Holly Goddard Jones, author of Antipodes and Girl Trouble
Zamorano’s collection of stories is a medley of surprises, heartbreak, and triumph. In these tales, Zamorano offers a feast both magical and stark, interweaving miracles and realities of working class daily life amid the bonds of family—mothers and sons, daughters and grandmothers, lovers snatching tenderness in ambiguous spaces—and with deft language and precise, evocative style, lays open the complicated webbing connecting this community.
Marcela Fuentes, author of Malas, Reforma National Book Award winner
Désirée Zamorano’s delightful debut story collection is an enchanting world of varied, fascinating, mostly Latine characters whose interiority she explores masterfully. With eloquence and care, Zamorano renders a refreshing range of Latinas of all classes—daughters, sisters, mothers, grandmothers, and wives—whose disparate experiences include a college professor with a PhD, a dental hygienist, a business woman at the top of her game, a student, and even God Herself. This gorgeous, entertaining collection of characters and stories is a triumph.
Toni Ann Johnson, author of the Flannery O’Connor Award-winning linked story collection, Light Skin Gone to Waste, and But Where’s Home
Zamorano offers a significant contribution to Latinx short story collections.
Norma Cantú, Norine R. and T. Frank Murchison Distinguished Professor of the Humanities, Trinity University, author of Canícula: Snapshots of a Girlhood en la Frontera.
