This July, BookSwell’s Read Local SoCal pick is Amarisa’s Cooking Pot: Tales of Life in All Its Wonders by Désirée Zamorano, a Southern California author whose new story collection moves between the fantastic and the ordinary to explore Mexican American life in all its wonder. We’re reading it together all month, and we invite you to read along.

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About the book

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.

“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

Genre: Literary Fiction · Short Stories. Themes: Mexican American life, magical realism, family, the fantastic woven through the everyday. Published by University of Nevada Press (New Oeste series), June 2, 2026. Buy the book on Bookshop.org Bookshop.org affiliate purchases support both the author and independent bookstores. BookSwell earns a small commission at no cost to you.

Meet Désirée Zamorano

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 invisibility, injustice, and inequity. 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. Find her at desireezamorano.com and on Instagram at @ladeziree.

Read along with us

Every Read Local SoCal feature includes a discussion guide we send by email, designed to help book clubs and solo readers go deeper on the book’s themes and craft. The discussion guide for Amarisa’s Cooking Pot is ready. Drop your email below and we’ll send it straight to your inbox, along with the rest of the Read Local July kit.

Companion reads

If Amarisa’s Cooking Pot lands for you, here are three more books we recommend pairing it with. All links go through Bookshop.org to support indie bookstores.

• Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories by Sandra Cisneros. The canonical companion: Mexican American stories that move between the everyday and the mythic, told in voices that range from tender to ferocious.
• Sabrina & Corina by Kali Fajardo-Anstine. A Latina short-story collection about family, grief, and resilience in the American West — the same collection energy and the same gift for the quietly desperate and the gloriously alive.
• Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado. Genre-bending, fantastical stories where the uncanny presses in on ordinary women’s lives — a natural pairing for Zamorano’s slide between the fantastic and the ordinary.

How to participate

• Follow along on Instagram. We post Read Local SoCal content on @bookswellclub throughout the month — author spotlights, pull quotes, and reader shoutouts.
• Tag us in your reading. Post a photo of the book, a favorite line, or your read-along setup, tag @bookswellclub and use #ReadLocalSoCal. We boost reader posts all month.
• Tag the author. Tag @ladeziree when you post and let her know what landed for you.
• Find us on Facebook. If Instagram isn’t your home, follow BookSwell on Facebook. Same content, slightly different crowd.

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About Read Local SoCal

Read Local SoCal is BookSwell’s monthly campaign connecting readers in Southern California with local authors — particularly Black, Indigenous, Asian, Latinx, LGBTQ+, women, nonbinary, and indie writers. Each month spotlights one book by one author. We provide a free discussion guide, recommend companion reads, and amplify the readers, book clubs, and creators who are already lifting these books up. The program runs through mid-November, with a new featured book on the first of every month. Want the next pick delivered to your inbox the day it drops? Subscribe to the BookSwell newsletter.