I’ve written and published one hundred very short ghost stories, plus a handful of longer ones, and have spent a lifetime reading and watching and thinking about stories of ghosts and the afterlife. My expertise, such as it is, involves ghosts as beings of narrative and metaphor. I’ve encountered great numbers of them on the page and on the screen—nowhere else—but I confess that I would love someday (though don’t expect) to encounter them in the flesh. My flesh, that is to say; their fleshlessness.
A spirit who is fated to spend eternity reliving the exact moment she lost her chance at love, ghostly trees that haunt the occupant of a wooden house, specters that snatch anyone who steps into the shadows, and parakeets that serve as mouthpieces for the dead—these are just a few of the characters in this extraordinary compendium of one hundred ghost stories. Kevin Brockmeier’s fiction has always explored the space between the fantastical and everyday with profundity and poignancy. Like his previous books, The Ghost Variations discovers new ways of looking at who we are and what matters to us, exploring how mysterious, sad, strange, and comical it is to be alive—or, as it happens, not to be.
Aira is one of the most interesting novelists alive today, a writer whose wit, energy, and unfailingly restless imagination ensure that his books never follow a straightforward path, and thus always surprise you. Ghosts, my favorite of those books, presents the story of a half-constructed luxury apartment complex, the ghosts who wander its beams and its floors, and the adolescent girl to whom they call. Recommended if you like your ghosts circumambulating and avant-garde.
"On a building site of a new, luxury apartment building, visitors looked up at the strange, irregular form of the water tank that crowned the edifice, and the big parabolic dish that would supply television images to all the floors. On the edge of the dish, a sharp metallic edge on which no bird would have dared to perch, three completely naked men were sitting, with their faces turned up to the midday sun; no one saw them, of course." - from Ghosts
Ghosts is about a construction worker's family squatting on a building site. They all see large and…
Beagle is best known for his novel The Last Unicorn, but A Fine and Private Place, written when he was just nineteen, is even better, I think. It takes place in a Brooklyn cemetery, where two recently disembodied spirits meet, fall in love, and resolve not to sink into oblivion. Recommended if you like your ghosts wistful, lyrical, and romantic.
A kindly raven brings food to and is the companion of a man who has taken refuge in an abandoned mausoleum in a New York City cemetery for nineteen years. Title: A Fine & Private Place Author: Beagle, Peter S. Publisher: Tachyon Publications Publication Date: 2007/05/28 Number of Pages: 264 Binding Type: PAPERBACK Library of Congress: bl2007019271
This, Dorst’s first novel, adopts the trappings of a police procedural but is at heart a character drama seasoned with elements of the supernatural. It follows the fortunes of a rookie cop in the “cemetery city” of Colma, California, whose charges, he quickly discovers, include both the living and the dead. Recommended if you like your ghosts eerie and your human beings haunted not only by wakeful spirits but by their own personal blunders and false starts.
A "dark and funny debut"(Seattle-Times) about a young police officer struggling to maintain a sense of reality in a town where the dead outnumber the living.
Colma, California, the "cemetery city" serving San Francisco, is the resting place of the likes of Joe DiMaggio, Wyatt Earp, and William Randolph Hearst. It is also the home of Michael Mercer, a by-the-book rookie cop struggling to settle comfortably into adult life. Instead, he becomes obsessed with the mysterious fate of his predecessor, Sergeant Wes Featherstone, who spent his last years policing the dead as well as the living. As Mercer attempts to…
Harington was one of the great unheralded—or at least under heralded—novelists of the last fifty years, bursting with stories and whole populations of flawlessly captured human voices, and With was one of his highest achievements. It follows the fortunes of a kidnapped girl in the Arkansas Ozarks who befriends the woods’ menagerie of animals, as well as the ghost (or, as Harington would style it, the “in-habit”) of a twelve-year-old boy whose body did not die but moved away and abandoned him. Recommended if you like your ghosts warm-hearted and aching for home.
With is the sensual, suspenseful and irresistible tale of Robin Kerr, a young girl abducted from her family and brought to a remote Ozark mountaintop, where she is left to fend for herself. Over the course of a decade, Robin grows up without human relationship, but with the company of animals and an inhabit, the half-living ghost of a young boy. In this magical novel in the Stay More series, Harington gives us one of the most original survival, coming-of-age, and love stories ever told.
One of the most inventive novels of recent years, Leanne Shapton’s Guestbook uses prose, photographs, and illustrations to find thirty-three ways of approaching the ghost story. The book moves swiftly and exhilaratingly through its pages, which are knit together by a sense of what it means for spirits to fasten themselves unexpectedly to people and what it means for people to feel haunted. Recommended if you like your ghosts both abundantly imagined and abundantly pictured.
'Shapton has created a mystical territory - a performance, an exhibition, a guestbook - in which I felt the ghost within myself; the thing that will outlive me. A fearless and exquisite book' Miranda July
Guestbook explores the glimmering, unsettling things that haunt us in the midst of life, combining stories, vignettes and an evocative curiosity cabinet of artifacts and images - found photographs, original paintings, Instagram-style portraits - to transform the traditional ghost story into something else entirely.
'Leanne Shapton has a way of making books entirely new, surreal, and uncanny ... Guestbook contains ghost stories for a world…
My book recommendations reflect an abiding passion for Japanese literature, which has unquestionably influenced my own writing. My latest literary interest involves Japanese poetry—I’ve recently started a project that combines haiku and prose narration to describe my experiences as a part-time resident in a 1300-year-old Japanese hot spring town that Bashō helped make famous in The Narrow Road to the Deep North. But as a writer, my main focus remains novels. In late 2023 the second in a planned series of novels set in Ishikawa prefecture will be published. I currently live in Kanazawa, but have also been lucky to call Sapporo, Akita, Tokyo, and Fukui home at different times.
Emmitt’s plans collapse when his wife, Mirai, suddenly backs out of purchasing their dream home. Disappointed, he’s surprised to discover her subtle pursuit of a life and career in Tokyo.
In his search for a meaningful life in Japan, and after quitting his job, he finds himself helping his mother-in-law translate Kanazawa’s most famous author, Izumi Kyoka, into English. He becomes drawn into the mysterious death of a friend of Mirai’s parents, leading him and his father-in-law to climb the mountain where the man died. There, he learns the somber truth and discovers what the future holds for him and his wife.
Packed with subtle literary allusion and closely observed nuance, Kanazawa reflects the mood of Japanese fiction in a fresh, modern incarnation.
In Kanazawa, the first literary novel in English to be set in this storied Japanese city, Emmitt's future plans collapse when his wife, Mirai, suddenly backs out of negotiations to purchase their dream home. Disappointed, he's surprised to discover Mirai's subtle pursuit of a life and career in Tokyo, a city he dislikes.
Harmony is further disrupted when Emmitt's search for a more meaningful life in Japan leads him to quit an unsatisfying job at a local university. In the fallout, he finds himself helping his mother-in-law translate Kanazawa's most famous author, Izumi Kyoka, into English.
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