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Ghosts of You Paperback – July 16, 2019

by Cathy Ulrich (Author)
4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars 26 ratings
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Cathy Ulrich's debut short story collection, GHOSTS OF YOU, seeks out the names of the lost and finds the person behind the sensationalism. It examines some of the most common tropes in mystery and crime storytelling, in which the narrative always begins with the body of yet another murdered woman. They are mothers and daughters, teachers and students, lovers and wives, actresses and extras. Their lives have been taken, but their stories still remain. This is how they set the plot in motion...
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  1. Print length
    200 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publication date
    July 16, 2019
  4. Dimensions
    5.5 x 0.5 x 8.5 inches
  5. ISBN-10
    1733244107
  6. ISBN-13
    978-1733244107
  7. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"'The thing about being the murdered girl,' writes Cathy Ulrich, 'is you set the plot in motion.' But, of course, it's Ulrich herself who brilliantly constructs the plot set in, around, before, and after another senseless murder - making fully realized gems of stories in the most unlikely of spaces." - Amber Sparks, author of THE UNFINISHED WORLD and AND I DO NOT FORGIVE YOU

"GHOSTS OF YOU, the debut collection of Cathy Ulrich's brilliantly original 'Murdered Ladies' stories, is by turns a haunted and haunting literary work. This book left me deeply moved, shaken, and forever changed. Read these stories, then seek out everything else Ulrich has written, for she is a writer of singular voice and vision and this is only the beginning." - Kathy Fish, author of WILD LIFE: COLLECTED WORKS, 2003-2018

"Cathy Ulrich gives voice to all the romanticized murdered darlings - wives, lovers, prom queens, babysitters, cheerleaders - lying unquestioned at the heart of the American media. GHOSTS OF YOU is a powerful meditation on loss that restores their lives anew, and more: it's a lyrical and fiercely human howl in the wilderness." - Kendra Fortmeyer, author of HOLE IN THE MIDDLE

"In a dazzling, richly detailed series of second-person narratives addressed to ghostly girls and women, Cathy Ulrich unearths their buried lives and the lives of those around them. Every single one of them becomes unforgettable. In a culture increasingly inured to violence against women and at a time when women are being systematically silenced and disempowered, their bodies and voices erased, stories like these take on particular urgency and importance. GHOSTS OF YOU will haunt you. Don't miss this stunning debut collection." - Jacqueline Doyle, author of THE MISSING GIRL

About the Author

Cathy Ulrich is the founding editor of Milk Candy Review, a journal of flash fiction. Her work has been published in various journals, including Black Warrior Review, Passages North, and Wigleaf and can be found in Best Microfiction 2019 and 2020, Best Small Fictions 2019, and Wigleaf's Top 50 Very Short Fictions 2019. She lives in Montana with her daughter and various small animals.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Okay Donkey Press (July 16, 2019)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 200 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1733244107
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1733244107
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 9.1 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 0.5 x 8.5 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars 26 ratings

About the author

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Cathy Ulrich

Cathy Ulrich

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Cathy Ulrich is the founding editor of Milk Candy Review, a journal of flash fiction. Her work has been published in various journals, including Black Warrior Review, Jellyfish Review, Passages North, Split Lip Magazine, and Wigleaf and can be found in Best Microfiction 2021 and 2022, Best of the Net 2022, Best Small Fictions 2019, and Wigleaf’s Top 50 Very Short Fictions 2019 and 2022. Her first story collection, GHOSTS OF YOU, was released by Okay Donkey Press in 2019, and her follow-up story collection, SMALL, BURNING THINGS, was released by Okay Donkey Press in 2023. Cathy lives in Montana with her daughter and various small animals.

Customer reviews

4.4 out of 5 stars
4.4 out of 5
26 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Jim Healey
5.0 out of 5 stars A Terrific Read
Reviewed in the United States on January 15, 2020
Verified Purchase
48 pieces of flash fiction from the imagination and hands of a pro! Each vignette begins with "The thing about being the murdered" and unfolds to create a life with all of its complexities and subtleties. "Ghosts of You" is an enjoyable and refreshing read.
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Guzman
5.0 out of 5 stars Must read flash
Reviewed in the United States on October 18, 2019
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The Murdered Ladies series is a must read. Especially for fans or writers of flash, and Cathy Ulrich is a master.
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Ray N.
3.0 out of 5 stars Ghosts of You
Reviewed in the United States on December 3, 2019
3.5 stars
Cathy Uhlrich is one of the most interesting short fiction writers on the scene today. Her first collection, Ghosts of You, isn’t intended to represent her work at large. Instead, it is a collection of stories linked by subject, by style, by look, etc. It is subtitled, tellingly, The Murdered Ladies Series. Every story is titled almost identically: ‘Being the Murdered Girl’ is followed by ‘Being the Murdered Wife’, then ‘Lover’, ‘Actress’, ‘Coed’ and so on. And each story begins with the same sentence, identical except for the subject: “The thing about being the murdered girl is you set the plot in motion.” Every story is similar in length, (3 or 4 pages or so); all dialog is presented in italics; repetition (of a welcome kind) for poetic effect is often employed (evident in some of the excerpts below); and the subject of each story, never named, is always referred to in second person: You. (Second person, always a challenge for both writer and reader, seems to invite the reader to identify very directly with the protagonist, as if the reader is the character, or to interpret it as the author referring directly to the character herself. FWIW, the latter is usually how I, as a reader, approach it.) Lastly, every story is told in what is by far the rarest and most challenging of tenses, the future tense. I know of only one novel written in future tense. I would guess this must be the first collection, ever, of stories in future tense. Uhlrich’s choice here was a brave one, and many of the stories, read in isolation, read surprisingly well and are very effective. However, there is a reason future tense is rare. And the sameness of format and style got to be tedious for me, here and there. I got past that by reading only a few stories a day.
Selected excerpts:
‘Being the Murdered Girl’:
The neighbors’ daughters will communicate with each other through a complicated series of smoke signals. One of them will have found the pack of cigarettes you used to hide down the street from the bus stop, in Mrs. Barneyback’s bushes, and they’ll each take cigarettes from the pack to send each other messages from their windows. The neighborhood will be filled with smoke for days.
Looks like rain, the adults will remark. Looks like rain.

‘Being the Murdered Clerk’:
Yours will be the face parents know better than the faces of their own daughters; yours will be the name uttered in cautions from mothers buttoning their children into autumn jackets.
Be careful, they’ll say. Oh be careful.

‘Being the Murdered Politician’:
And the videos will pop up, again, again, again, the crack of the rifle, the hush of your body hitting the ground, the quiet release of balloons by an intern mistaking their cue, rising up into the sky, red, white, blue balloons peppering the air, and then gone, gone, gone.

‘Being the Murdered Daughter’:
Your father will climb the ladder first, then your mother. They will be looking for your ghost there; they will push past stacks of encyclopedias, empty shoe boxes, pretty wine bottles, inhale the scent of ancient Christmas mittens. They will hold hands, they will breathe together, they will sigh dry tears when your mother opens the attic window and the small grey bats that have been nesting in the attic startle and stretch, and rush out, rush out into the night.
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Lynn Mundell
5.0 out of 5 stars Gone But Not Fogotten: Giving Voice to Murdered Women
Reviewed in the United States on December 7, 2019
When women die of violence, their stories are told in ways that are often sensationalized, seldom sympathetic, and always truncated, leaving those reading between the lines wondering, who was she? What happened? Who cared about her and misses her? When the headlines are gone, who will remember her?

In Cathy Ulrich's sobering, beautifully written collection of short-short stories, she gives voice to dozens of invented women--mothers, wives, daughters, lovers--who in fiction represent all of the real-life women who are killed every day. Each story begins with the same line about setting the plot in motion--perhaps a nod to the sameness of the unending violence against women; perhaps a signal that the writer is beginning her work--but from there the stories are unique to each woman, from her circumstances and death to the other characters in the stories.

The individual stories and the entire collection are so rich that they demand multiple readings in order to absorb two things. First is the beautiful writing, which despite the topic is not gory but rather sympathetic to victims and loved ones, and full of poetry: "For the mermaids, it will seem like everything has gone underwater since you died. The hush and quiet of the sea. They'll like to think of their time in the tank as being part of the sea, the tickle of fish fin brushing against their shoulders, winks of the patrons blurred by hazy water." ("Murdered Mermaid")

Second is really the subtext of the book and the thoughtful, careful choices Ulrich makes as a writer. For example, she steers away from solving the mysteries for us, as much as we readers want to know who, who did this? She could be making the point that we often tell more of the story of the murderer than the murdered. So, instead, she focuses on each woman, sketching in who she was beyond the title of murdered babysitter, teacher, hermit, and so forth.

Ulrich also devotes time to the survivors, and by doing so illustrates how violent crime affects everyone around a victim, from her children and parents to her colleagues and community. The latter is brought home crushingly in the story "Murdered Jogger": "The wives will know it's not terrible for their husbands the way it is for them. The wives will button their jackets up to their chins, the wives will clutch their car keys in their hands, think they hear the sound of footsteps behind them."

Ulrich uses the standard language of our society in order to provoke thought, too. For example, the stories are collected together in "The Murdered Ladies Series," as though saying the violence is so common it is serialized, that we read such real-life stories as entertainment, and that the humans at the center are dehumanized to being generic "ladies." (In fact, they are not named in the stories; instead, they are given a general identifier, such as professor or co-ed, which seems to further the point that we don't really want to know more than the most superficial thing about victims of violence. But once Ulrich sets the plot in motion, she tells us exactly who each is in unforgettable detail.)

Individually, the stories are intelligent and affecting. Collectively, they are a powerful and thought-provoking. 2019 has seen a bumper crop of published flash fiction collections, but for me this one stands at as one of the best if not the best for its cohesiveness, quality of writing, and sensitive exploration of a challenging, topic that should be of interest to anyone.
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