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Pearls from Their Mouth
An explosive collection of myths and musings on the body, desire and power.
This book is built of stories and provocations—like the birth of a pearl, it transforms that which irritates, layer by layer.
Through speculative fiction and critical essays, Pear Nuallak explores what happens when messy, desiring bodies collide with the hard edge of power. The world’s neat categories are unmade and rewritten, revealing that racial capitalism’s myths are just as much fantasies as Thai bird princesses and transgender magic.
Moving playfully across folktale, horror, satire and critique, Nuallak examines how different beings are formed politically, bodily and emotionally. We discover interdimensional fungi resisting colonisation, queer monsters living on Hampstead Heath, and a mysterious canal running through the ruins of capitalism into interstitial realms. We test the borders of queer diasporic nationalism and take apart the racially melancholic memoir. In this fiery yet delicate collection, we aren’t bound by truth, but flow with it into new worlds.
This book is built of stories and provocations—like the birth of a pearl, it transforms that which irritates, layer by layer.
Through speculative fiction and critical essays, Pear Nuallak explores what happens when messy, desiring bodies collide with the hard edge of power. The world’s neat categories are unmade and rewritten, revealing that racial capitalism’s myths are just as much fantasies as Thai bird princesses and transgender magic.
Moving playfully across folktale, horror, satire and critique, Nuallak examines how different beings are formed politically, bodily and emotionally. We discover interdimensional fungi resisting colonisation, queer monsters living on Hampstead Heath, and a mysterious canal running through the ruins of capitalism into interstitial realms. We test the borders of queer diasporic nationalism and take apart the racially melancholic memoir. In this fiery yet delicate collection, we aren’t bound by truth, but flow with it into new worlds.
179 pages, Paperback
First published July 28, 2022
7 people are currently reading
212 people want to read
About the author
Pear Nuallak
9 books2 followersPear Nuallak was born in London and raised by Bangkokian artists. They studied History of Art jointly at SOAS and UCL, specialising in Thai art. Their work has appeared in Unlikely Academia, Interfictions, and Lackington’s.
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
August 6, 2022
“This is a book about the body…all the strange, gorgeous, sensate forms that experience the world.” Pear Nuallak wrote the book (which is magnificent) in the final year of their art degree. The title is a reference to the course tutors who seemed to see their work as providing apocryphal grit around which pearls formed within the soft insides of their students. It’s an analogy to which Nuallak gives short shrift; “i’m not going to be slit open and divested of something that is essentially commoditised scar tissue.” For Nuallak, art shouldn’t be an aesthetic repository for rich people’s money. “Art should be action, a way of forming relationships with each other, a way of anticipating new worlds and testing ideas for liberation.” Taking this idea as a starting point, “Pearls From Their Mouth” offers an imaginarium of possibilities.
The book is a mixture of essays and fictions which whirl around questions of identity, queerness and power. In the essays, Nuallak writes with a clarity that convinces. What is the point of oppressed minorities striving for increased visibility within social structures when it’s the structures themselves which are the cause of the oppression? “I do not want to live within a hierarchical power structure at all.” Nuallak has an ESEA (“the latest acronym for East and South-East Asians”) background. Numerous ESEA activist groups have formed in recent years but Nuallak finds the movement “aesthetically and politically repugnant.” There is a corporate gloss to the activism which, all too often, ends up being an attempt to “work nicely with the government”. Nuallak dreams of a very different world. “I want to ask some of these activists: where is your anger? Where is the fire? Where are the teeth? What are you actually doing, and what do you actually want?” They have a suggestion for those yearning for more power and more prisons in which to lock up the haters. “We could yearn for liberation instead.”
The fictions, there are five of them, are glorious. “Fifth Finger, Left Hand” is a tale of a no-longer-flying princess (“Those were such pretty green and gold wings”) contracting with a witch (“her nails the perfect colour of poison”) to create a sanctuary where women and sexual minorities “can turn over their memories to us and start afresh.” Then there’s “An Injury To One”, a collection of absurd and gripping pieces, many involving the testimony of funguses. In one, a hermit comes upon a girl-shaped fruit, takes it as his wife and performs on it his husbandly duty. “He falls asleep inside of her and dreams she is not a single yielding body but a mass of potential, threading through the earth. It is as easy as breathing to know this and simply become her.” The fictions add living flesh to the arguments set out in the essays. And they act as an alternative to the public life imposed on us today, fiction after fiction masquerading as reality.
This is a fascinating, stimulating, lyrical book. Pear Nuallak offers it “to my loved ones / To those who burn with anger they want neither to be engulfed by nor to swallow down / To every person who understands that we can always choose a different starting point”. If you fit into any of those categories, you really need to read this.
The book is a mixture of essays and fictions which whirl around questions of identity, queerness and power. In the essays, Nuallak writes with a clarity that convinces. What is the point of oppressed minorities striving for increased visibility within social structures when it’s the structures themselves which are the cause of the oppression? “I do not want to live within a hierarchical power structure at all.” Nuallak has an ESEA (“the latest acronym for East and South-East Asians”) background. Numerous ESEA activist groups have formed in recent years but Nuallak finds the movement “aesthetically and politically repugnant.” There is a corporate gloss to the activism which, all too often, ends up being an attempt to “work nicely with the government”. Nuallak dreams of a very different world. “I want to ask some of these activists: where is your anger? Where is the fire? Where are the teeth? What are you actually doing, and what do you actually want?” They have a suggestion for those yearning for more power and more prisons in which to lock up the haters. “We could yearn for liberation instead.”
The fictions, there are five of them, are glorious. “Fifth Finger, Left Hand” is a tale of a no-longer-flying princess (“Those were such pretty green and gold wings”) contracting with a witch (“her nails the perfect colour of poison”) to create a sanctuary where women and sexual minorities “can turn over their memories to us and start afresh.” Then there’s “An Injury To One”, a collection of absurd and gripping pieces, many involving the testimony of funguses. In one, a hermit comes upon a girl-shaped fruit, takes it as his wife and performs on it his husbandly duty. “He falls asleep inside of her and dreams she is not a single yielding body but a mass of potential, threading through the earth. It is as easy as breathing to know this and simply become her.” The fictions add living flesh to the arguments set out in the essays. And they act as an alternative to the public life imposed on us today, fiction after fiction masquerading as reality.
This is a fascinating, stimulating, lyrical book. Pear Nuallak offers it “to my loved ones / To those who burn with anger they want neither to be engulfed by nor to swallow down / To every person who understands that we can always choose a different starting point”. If you fit into any of those categories, you really need to read this.
July 27, 2022
A beautiful, funny, critical and moving collection
November 10, 2022
it’s really just quite brilliant, the mix of fiction and essays perfectly come together
September 26, 2023
Never willing nor wanting of tucking its claws away, this book is a call to arms and a beautiful series of stories and essays infused with mythology, pathos, energizing rage at the keepers and creators of the status quo, navigating our own fleshy bodies and our relationships with race, gender, and family. Absolutely vicious, heartfelt, and brilliant. This is a book that will live in the place in my head where the books I REMEMBER settle in.
June 2, 2024
Inarguably one of the best books I have ever read. In a time when I have more questions than answers these stories are the medium for reassurance of togetherness.
There is so much to say about the way Pear Nuallak speaks to us, to those who “burn with anger they want neither to be engulfed by not to swallow down” (dedication). This book is my starting point and I hope with every new read I will find more and more. Just read it, really. “NO GODS, NO MASTERS” (168)
There is so much to say about the way Pear Nuallak speaks to us, to those who “burn with anger they want neither to be engulfed by not to swallow down” (dedication). This book is my starting point and I hope with every new read I will find more and more. Just read it, really. “NO GODS, NO MASTERS” (168)
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April 18, 2023Lots to think about regarding the insights in these writings. Especially enjoyed 'Skin Like Sunlight Through Water' and 'Picking at the Leftovers of 'Grandma's Recipe for Cultural Authenticity''
January 2, 2025
Lots to unpack about this book - both the essays and the speculative fiction are well crafted and leaves you wanting more.
July 14, 2025
remarkably incisive at its best. our society is a scary, sad place- burn it all down.
November 3, 2023
very moving. critical essays and stories on queer diaspora of ESEA communities and how systems of power and oppression exert power on the body. there's even a bit where interdimensional fungi eat the rich and resist colonisation in [year unknown]. savoured every chapter
October 23, 2025
8.5
Was really charmed by the short stories, though it did at points get a little heavy handed for my tastes!
As for the essays, the arguments were very compelling, but on occasion I felt like certain points were not discussed with sufficient depth - not for lack of understanding of the author, but sometimes for the reader's sake and for the sake of a more comprehensive argument this would be an improvement
thanks maddie for lending this to me! :D
Was really charmed by the short stories, though it did at points get a little heavy handed for my tastes!
As for the essays, the arguments were very compelling, but on occasion I felt like certain points were not discussed with sufficient depth - not for lack of understanding of the author, but sometimes for the reader's sake and for the sake of a more comprehensive argument this would be an improvement
thanks maddie for lending this to me! :D
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews