Ghost Stories (2019)

Cover image: Graham Fletcher / Cover Design: Daniela Gast

(July 31) Ghost Stories. 978-0-9951165-5-9. 99% Press. Auckland: Lasavia Publishing, 2019. 140 pp.

1. The Classic New Zealand Ghost Story (17/1/15-25/7/16)

Stories:


2. Eketahuna (7-13/12/11)
3. The Scam (25/12/01-13/9/02)
4. Featherston (1-17/1/11)
5. Leaves from a Diary of the End of the World (6/2-27/4/13)
6. Is it Infrareal or is it Memorex? (11-17/11/14)
7. Company (13-14/12/14)
8. General Grant in Paeroa (12/9-24/11/15)
9. Brothers (20-23/12/15)
10. Catfish (14-28/12/17)

The Cross-Correspondences:


11. Paragraphs (4/6/18-26/1/19)
12. Kipling and the Cross-Correspondences (6/6/18-18/1/19)

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Lasavia Publishing

when a house is haunted it’s one’s own ghost that invites the others in

– Cao Xueqin, The Red Chamber Dream [1]

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Stories

My mind on other things, I said that The Red Badge of Courage was ‘a great ghost story in which the ghost never appears’.

– Peter Straub, Ghost Story [2]

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The Cross-Correspondences


Lean near to life. Lean very near – nearer.
– Max Beerbohm, ‘Enoch Soames’ [3]

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Jack Ross: Ghost Stories (2019)

Blurb:

David Foster Wallace once wrote that 'every love story is a ghost story.' Not all of the stories in Jack Ross’s new collection are about love, but certainly all of them concern ghosts – imaginary, real, or entirely absent. As it turns out, there are even stranger things in the world: from haunted hotel rooms in Beijing to drunken poetry readings on Auckland’s North Shore. Or perhaps, as the Mayan prophets foresaw, the world really did end on the 21st December, 2012, and 'all bets are off, all the rules have changed, and – new Adams, new Eves – we have to find the courage somehow to start naming the strange new things we see.'

'There’s no one in New Zealand literature exploring the dark ways of narrative with the alchemical touch of Jack Ross, and his gift of spinning tales which jump "from track to track on the time-space continuum" never fails to leave me exhilarated, in outright awe'.

- Tracey Slaughter

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Notes:

[1] Cao Xueqin, The Story of the Stone. 5 vols. Volume 3: The Warning Voice. Trans. David Hawkes (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1980), 425.

[2] Peter Straub, Ghost Story. 1st ed. 1979 (London: Futura, 1980), 216.

[3] Max Beerbohm, ‘Enoch Soames: A Memory of the Eighteen-nineties.’ Seven Men. 1st ed. 1919 (London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1926), 11.

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Graham Fletcher, "Untitled: Red, Yellow, Blue and Black" (2018)
[photograph by Bronwyn Lloyd]

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