Ghost stories tap into our most primal emotions as they encourage us to confront the timeless question: What comes after death? Here, in tales that are by turn scary, funny, philosophic, and touching, you’ll find that question sharpened, split, reconsidered—and met with a multitude of answers.
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 the everyday with profundity and poignancy. As in 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.
By:
Kevin Brockmeier
Imprint: Pantheon Books
Country of Publication: United States [Currently unable to ship to USA: see Shipping Info]
Dimensions:
Height: 211mm,
Width: 145mm,
Spine: 29mm
Weight: 459g
ISBN: 9781524748838
ISBN 10: 1524748838
Pages: 288
Publication Date: 09 March 2021
Audience:
General/trade
,
ELT Advanced
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
GHOSTS AND MEMORY One: A Notable Social Event • 3 Two: The Guidance Counselor • 5 Three: A Hatchet, Several Candlesticks, a Pincushion, and a Top Hat • 7 Four: Milo Krain • 9 Five: Amnesia • 11 Six: A Long Chain of Yesterdays • 13 GHOSTS AND FORTUNE Seven: The Hitchhiker • 19 Eight: Wishes • 21 Nine: How to Play • 23 Ten: The Scales of Fortune • 25 Eleven: A Moment, However Small • 27 Twelve: A Gathering • 29 Thirteen: Mira Amsler • 31 GHOSTS AND NATURE Fourteen: Elephants • 37 Fifteen: The White Mare • 39 Sixteen: Many Additional Animals • 41 Seventeen: Bees • 43 Eighteen: A Blight on the Landscape • 45 Nineteen: An Ossuary of Trees • 47 Twenty: Things That Fall from the Sky • 49 Twenty-one: A Story with a Drum Beating Inside It • 51 Twenty-two: The Sandbox Initiative • 53 Twenty-three: Renewable Resources • 55 GHOSTS AND TIME Twenty-four: Thirteen Visitations • 61 Twenty-five: The Office of Hereafters and Dissolutions • 63 Twenty-six: An Obituary • 65 Twenty-seven: The Midpoint • 67 Twenty-eight: The Whirl of Time • 69 Twenty-nine: Minnows • 71 Thirty: A Story Swaying Back and Forth • 73 Thirty-one: A Time-Travel Story with a Little Romance and a Happy Ending • 75 GHOSTS AND SPECULATION Thirty-two: The Phantasm vs the Statue • 81 Thirty-three: Footprints • 83 Thirty-four: Passengers • 85 Thirty-five: New Life, New Civilizations • 87 Thirty-six: A Blackness Went Fluttering By • 89 Thirty-seven: The Prism • 91 Thirty-eight: His Womanhood • 93 Thirty-nine: There Are People, They Had Lives • 95 Forty: The Soldiers of the 115th Regiment • 97 GHOSTS AND VISION Forty-one: Action! • 103 Forty-two: The Way the Ring of a Moat Becomes Comforting to a Fish • 105 Forty-three: Spectrum • 107 Forty-four: Every House Key, Every Fire Hydrant, Every Electrical Outlet • 109 Forty-five: The Walls • 111 Forty-six: Playtime • 113 Forty-seven: All His Life • 115 Forty-eight: Take It with Me • 117 Forty-nine: A Story Seen in Glimpses Through the Mist • 119 GHOSTS AND THE OTHER SENSES Fifty: A Lifetime of Touch • 125 Fifty-one: The Runner-Up • 127 Fifty-two: So Many Songs • 129 Fifty-three: A Matter of Acoustics • 131 Fifty-four: Bouquet • 133 Fifty-five: The Mud Odor of the Snow Melting in the Fields • 135 Fifty-six: Instrumentology • 137 Fifty-seven: When the Room Is Quiet, the Daylight Almost Gone • 139 Fifty-eight: A Sort of Fellow • 141 Fifty-nine: A Lesser Feeling • 143 GHOSTS AND BELIEF Sixty: A Small Disruption of Reality • 149 Sixty-one: The Abnormalist and the Usualist • 151 Sixty-two: Real Estate • 153 Sixty-three: Which Are the Crystals, Which the Solution • 155 Sixty-four: Countless Strange Couplings and Separations • 157 Sixty-five: Rapture • 159 Sixty-six: 666 • 161 GHOSTS AND LOVE AND FRIENDSHIP Sixty-seven: Lost and Found • 167 Sixty-eight: Another Man in a Mirror • 169 Sixty-nine: The Apostrophes • 171 Seventy: A Man in a Mirror • 173 Seventy:-one Turnstiles • 175 Seventy-two: A True Story • 177 Seventy-three: Bullets and What It Takes to Dodge Them • 179 Seventy-four: Knees • 181 Seventy-five: The Man She Is Trying to Forget • 183 Seventy-six: The Eternities • 185 Seventy-seven: Too Late • 187 Seventy-eight: Detention • 189 Seventy-nine: I Like Your Shoes • 191 GHOSTS AND FAMILY Eighty: The Ghost’s Disguise • 197 Eighty-one: A Source of Confusion • 199 Eighty-two: Unseeable, Untouchable • 201 Eighty-three: Ghost Brothers • 203 Eighty-four: A Second True Story • 205 Eighty-five A Life • 207 Eighty-six: Extraordinary Gifts • 209 Eighty-seven: An Inherited Disorder • 211 Eighty-eight: Prayer from an Airport Terminal • 213 Eighty-nine: Hatching • 215 Ninety: Bilateral Symmetry • 217 GHOSTS AND WORDS AND NUMBERS Ninety-one: Parakeets • 223 Ninety-two: Euphemisms • 225 Ninety-three: Roughly Eighty Grams • 227 Ninety-four: The Ghost Letter • 229 Ninety-five: A Matter of Linguistic • s231 Ninety-six: Dusk and Other Stories • 233 Ninety-seven: Telephone • 235 Ninety-eight: Numbers • 237 Ninety-nine: The Census • 239 One Hundred: The Most Terrifying Ghost Story Ever Written • 241 A Partial Concordance of Themes • 245 Acknowledgments • 267
KEVIN BROCKMEIER is the author of the novels The Ghost Variations, A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip, The Illumination, The Brief History of the Dead, and The Truth About Celia; the story collections Things That Fall from the Sky and The View from the Seventh Layer; and the children's novels City of Names and Grooves: A Kind of Mystery. His work has been translated into seventeen languages. He has published his stories in such venues as The New Yorker, The Georgia Review, McSweeney's, Zoetrope, Tin House, The Oxford American, The Best American Short Stories, The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, and New Stories from the South. He has received the Borders Original Voices Award, three O. Henry Awards (one, a first prize), the PEN USA Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and an NEA Grant. In 2007, he was named one of Granta magazine's Best Young American Novelists He teaches frequently at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and he lives in Little Rock, Arkansas, where he was raised.
Reviews for The Ghost Variations: One Hundred Stories
A teeming throng of stories in miniature in my favorite mode by one of my favorite writers. Brockmeier's ghosts range from the wistful to the terrifying-I could only wish that there were one hundred more. -Kelly Link, author of Get in Trouble The Ghost Variations is pure Kevin Brockmeier-lush and playful and devastating and brilliant; a haunted hotel with a hundred rooms and a hundred doors, behind which lie a hundred perfect and terrifying dioramas. It's been ages since I've been this profoundly sated by a story collection, and I loved every minute of it. -Carmen Maria Machado, author of Her Body and Other Parties The Ghost Variations is a haunted jukebox sparkling in the shadows, built to house a hundred voices, a hundred gorgeous songs. Each one is a masterpiece in miniature from one of our greatest writers, by turns funny and philosophical, chilling and warm. Like a palmful of smelling salts, these very short stories will wake you up. Only Kevin Brockmeier could write ghost stories that make a reader feel so alive. -Karen Russell, author of Orange World and Other Stories In Kevin Brockmeier's The Ghost Variations, the familiar poetry of life gives way to uncanny wonder and startling discoveries, leaving the reader constantly unsettled, as if we found a room in a house where none had been before or woke in the night to a figure standing at the bottom of the bed. There might be a hundred stories in this collection, but there are a million reasons to love Brockmeier, one of literature's greatest living talents, who writes sentences like spells and who elegantly phases between the walls of literary and genre fiction. -Benjamin Percy, author of Red Moon
