Excerpt from All Flesh by Ananda Devi, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Excerpt
All Flesh

I devour myself in delicious painlessness.

A lake of blood clots around me. All my short life, I've defied biology with my flesh. Now, I defy biology with my death.

The eye fixed on me, binding me to millions—billions—of other eyes, only steels my resolve to see my sacrifice through to the end. At last, I'm not just something to belittle and laugh at; at last, I'm free to relish, savor, eat this morbid fascination right up. I used to live to consume; I used to be seen as nothing but what went into my mouth and got digested in my guts and then was expelled. What identity I had was permanently impermanent. This attention at long last is sweet revenge for so many years as an outcast. Now, I can sear their retinas in turn; now, I can brand their thoughts with the red-hot iron of my ruin. Now, at last, I can have my just deserts for their onslaught of cruelty: I will haunt their nightmares.

Forgive me for starting this story with its bodily, unpalatable origins - although doesn't everything begin and end thus?

Everything, after all, is a story of flesh. Everything, in the end, comes down to this: our known yet inherently unknowable roots in our mothers' wombs.

Let us begin, then, with the orgasm of living.

Excerpted from All Flesh by Ananda Devi. Copyright © 2026 by Ananda Devi. Excerpted by permission of FSG Originals. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.