Why am I passionate about this?

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.


I wrote

The Ghost Variations: One Hundred Stories

By Kevin Brockmeier,

Book cover of The Ghost Variations: One Hundred Stories

What is my book about?

A spirit who is fated to spend eternity reliving the exact moment she lost her chance at love, ghostly trees…

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The books I picked & why

Book cover of Ghosts

Kevin Brockmeier Why did I love this book?

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.

By César Aira, Chris Andrews (translator),

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Ghosts as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

"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…


Book cover of A Fine & Private Place

Kevin Brockmeier Why did I love this book?

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.

By Peter S. Beagle,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked A Fine & Private Place as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

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


Book cover of Alive in Necropolis

Kevin Brockmeier Why did I love this book?

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.

By Doug Dorst,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Alive in Necropolis as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

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…


Book cover of With

Kevin Brockmeier Why did I love this book?

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.

By Donald Harington,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked With as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

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.


Book cover of Guestbook: Ghost Stories

Kevin Brockmeier Why did I love this book?

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.

By Leanne Shapton,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Guestbook as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

'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…


Explore my book 😀

The Ghost Variations: One Hundred Stories

By Kevin Brockmeier,

Book cover of The Ghost Variations: One Hundred Stories

What is my book about?

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.

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Stormwalker Series Connections In Time Bain's Story Book 1

By S.G. Boudreaux,

Book cover of Stormwalker Series Connections In Time Bain's Story Book 1

S.G. Boudreaux Author Of Earth

New book alert!

Why am I passionate about this?

I've always loved fiction, fantasy, and adventure stories. Growing up in the Star Wars generation, I was seven when A New Hope was released at the theaters. Living in the hollows of West Virginia there weren’t libraries close by, and movies were a great, though seldom, treat. Suggestive material and cursing was not something that we saw in books or movies growing up in a more simple period of time. I still thoroughly enjoy many well-written, clean, books or shows. As an active member of the body of Christ, I now serve with my writing, and hope that kids of all ages can enjoy epic fantasy and adventure books from a clean and wholesome perspective.

S.G.'s book list on clean-reading fantasy with religious undertones

What is my book about?

Finding Family, Discovery, Destiny. This is what nineteen-year-old Bain Brinley is searching for.

In his homeland, far in the mountains, he stepped into what he could only describe as a time-portal and landed in a strange land known as Egypt. Then he falls through another portal during a storm, only to end up in another world known as Harilhia. Here, he soon discovers a creature he knew from home. He was back, but it wasn't Zanchier.

Can he find his family, and figure out what the Creator wanted him to do with time-travel?

Stormwalker Series Connections In Time Bain's Story Book 1

By S.G. Boudreaux,

What is this book about?

Where was he and how did he get here?

Nineteen-year-old Bain Brinley has just inadvertently stepped into a time portal and was deposited into a world like none he had ever seen before. He turned to go back through the portal and back to Zanchier to find his family, only to find the portal gone. Now, Bain must face this strange, new, world without anyone else on whom he can depend.

As he gazes out over the hot, dry, desert climate at the large pyramid shaped structures, he is unsure where to go. He is soon thrust into a strange,…


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