{"product_id":"the-ghost-variations-isbn-9781524748838","title":"The Ghost Variations","description":"\u003cb\u003eGhost 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. \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e 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, \u003ci\u003eThe Ghost Variations\u003c\/i\u003e 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.\u003cb\u003eGHOSTS AND MEMORY\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e One: A Notable Social Event • 3 \u003cbr\u003e Two: The Guidance Counselor • 5 \u003cbr\u003e Three: A Hatchet, Several Candlesticks, a Pincushion, and a Top Hat • 7\u003cbr\u003e Four: Milo Krain • 9 \u003cbr\u003e Five: Amnesia • 11 \u003cbr\u003e Six: A Long Chain of Yesterdays • 13 \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e GHOSTS AND FORTUNE \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Seven: The Hitchhiker • 19 \u003cbr\u003e Eight: Wishes • 21 \u003cbr\u003e Nine: How to Play • 23 \u003cbr\u003e Ten: The Scales of Fortune • 25 \u003cbr\u003e Eleven: A Moment, However Small • 27 \u003cbr\u003e Twelve: A Gathering • 29 \u003cbr\u003e Thirteen: Mira Amsler • 31 \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003eGHOSTS AND NATURE \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Fourteen: Elephants • 37 \u003cbr\u003e Fifteen: The White Mare • 39 \u003cbr\u003e Sixteen: Many Additional Animals • 41 \u003cbr\u003e Seventeen: Bees • 43 \u003cbr\u003e Eighteen: A Blight on the Landscape • 45 \u003cbr\u003e Nineteen: An Ossuary of Trees • 47 \u003cbr\u003e Twenty: Things That Fall from the Sky • 49\u003cbr\u003e Twenty-one: A Story with a Drum Beating Inside It • 51 \u003cbr\u003e Twenty-two: The Sandbox Initiative • 53\u003cbr\u003e Twenty-three: Renewable Resources • 55 \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003eGHOSTS AND TIME\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Twenty-four: Thirteen Visitations • 61 \u003cbr\u003e Twenty-five: The Office of Hereafters and Dissolutions • 63 \u003cbr\u003e Twenty-six: An Obituary • 65 \u003cbr\u003e Twenty-seven: The Midpoint • 67\u003cbr\u003e Twenty-eight: The Whirl of Time • 69 \u003cbr\u003e Twenty-nine: Minnows • 71 \u003cbr\u003e Thirty: A Story Swaying Back and Forth • 73 \u003cbr\u003e Thirty-one: A Time-Travel Story with a Little Romance and a Happy Ending • 75 \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003eGHOSTS AND SPECULATION\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cbr\u003e Thirty-two: The Phantasm vs the Statue • 81 \u003cbr\u003e Thirty-three: Footprints • 83\u003cbr\u003e Thirty-four: Passengers • 85 \u003cbr\u003e Thirty-five: New Life, New Civilizations • 87 \u003cbr\u003e Thirty-six: A Blackness Went Fluttering By • 89 \u003cbr\u003e Thirty-seven: The Prism • 91 \u003cbr\u003e Thirty-eight: His Womanhood • 93 \u003cbr\u003e Thirty-nine: There Are People, They Had Lives • 95 \u003cbr\u003e Forty: The Soldiers of the 115th Regiment • 97 \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003eGHOSTS AND VISION\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cbr\u003e Forty-one: Action! • 103 \u003cbr\u003e Forty-two: The Way the Ring of a Moat Becomes Comforting to a Fish • 105 \u003cbr\u003e Forty-three: Spectrum • 107 \u003cbr\u003e Forty-four: Every House Key, Every Fire Hydrant, Every Electrical Outlet • 109 \u003cbr\u003e Forty-five: The Walls • 111 \u003cbr\u003e Forty-six: Playtime • 113 \u003cbr\u003e Forty-seven: All His Life • 115 \u003cbr\u003e Forty-eight: Take It with Me • 117 \u003cbr\u003e Forty-nine: A Story Seen in Glimpses Through the Mist • 119 \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003eGHOSTS AND THE OTHER SENSES\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cbr\u003e Fifty: A Lifetime of Touch • 125 \u003cbr\u003e Fifty-one: The Runner-Up • 127 \u003cbr\u003e Fifty-two: So Many Songs • 129 \u003cbr\u003e Fifty-three: A Matter of Acoustics • 131 \u003cbr\u003e Fifty-four: Bouquet • 133 \u003cbr\u003e Fifty-five: The Mud Odor of the Snow Melting in the Fields • 135 \u003cbr\u003e Fifty-six: Instrumentology • 137 \u003cbr\u003e Fifty-seven: When the Room Is Quiet, the Daylight Almost Gone • 139 \u003cbr\u003e Fifty-eight: A Sort of Fellow • 141 \u003cbr\u003e Fifty-nine: A Lesser Feeling • 143 \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003eGHOSTS AND BELIEF \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Sixty: A Small Disruption of Reality • 149 \u003cbr\u003e Sixty-one: The Abnormalist and the Usualist • 151 \u003cbr\u003e Sixty-two: Real Estate • 153 \u003cbr\u003e Sixty-three: Which Are the Crystals, Which the Solution • 155 \u003cbr\u003e Sixty-four: Countless Strange Couplings and Separations • 157 \u003cbr\u003e Sixty-five: Rapture • 159 \u003cbr\u003e Sixty-six: 666 • 161 \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003eGHOSTS AND LOVE AND FRIENDSHIP\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Sixty-seven: Lost and Found • 167 \u003cbr\u003e Sixty-eight: Another Man in a Mirror • 169 \u003cbr\u003e Sixty-nine: The Apostrophes • 171 \u003cbr\u003e Seventy: A Man in a Mirror • 173 \u003cbr\u003e Seventy:-one Turnstiles • 175 \u003cbr\u003e Seventy-two: A True Story • 177 \u003cbr\u003e Seventy-three: Bullets and What It Takes to Dodge Them • 179 \u003cbr\u003e Seventy-four: Knees • 181 \u003cbr\u003e Seventy-five: The Man She Is Trying to Forget • 183 \u003cbr\u003e Seventy-six: The Eternities • 185 \u003cbr\u003e Seventy-seven: Too Late • 187 \u003cbr\u003e Seventy-eight: Detention • 189 \u003cbr\u003e Seventy-nine: I Like Your Shoes • 191 \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003eGHOSTS AND FAMILY \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Eighty: The Ghost’s Disguise • 197 \u003cbr\u003e Eighty-one: A Source of Confusion • 199 \u003cbr\u003e Eighty-two: Unseeable, Untouchable • 201\u003cbr\u003e Eighty-three: Ghost Brothers • 203 \u003cbr\u003e Eighty-four: A Second True Story • 205 \u003cbr\u003e Eighty-five A Life • 207 \u003cbr\u003e Eighty-six: Extraordinary Gifts • 209 \u003cbr\u003e Eighty-seven: An Inherited Disorder • 211 \u003cbr\u003e Eighty-eight: Prayer from an Airport Terminal • 213 \u003cbr\u003e Eighty-nine: Hatching • 215 \u003cbr\u003e Ninety: Bilateral Symmetry • 217 \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003eGHOSTS AND WORDS AND NUMBERS \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Ninety-one: Parakeets • 223 \u003cbr\u003e Ninety-two: Euphemisms • 225 \u003cbr\u003e Ninety-three: Roughly Eighty Grams • 227 \u003cbr\u003e Ninety-four: The Ghost Letter • 229 \u003cbr\u003e Ninety-five: A Matter of Linguistic • s231 \u003cbr\u003e Ninety-six: Dusk and Other Stories • 233 \u003cbr\u003e Ninety-seven: Telephone • 235\u003cbr\u003e Ninety-eight: Numbers • 237\u003cbr\u003e Ninety-nine: The Census • 239\u003cbr\u003e One Hundred: The Most Terrifying Ghost Story Ever Written • 241 \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003eA Partial Concordance of Themes • 245 \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003eAcknowledgments • 267\u003c\/i\u003e“By turns scary, funny, touching, troubling and sad.” \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eUSA Today\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“Those who enjoyed Brockmeier’s \u003ci\u003eThe Brief History of the Dead\u003c\/i\u003e . . . will no doubt rejoice to read more poignant stories. . . . Ranges from funny to scary, checking all the boxes for those who love ghost stories in various forms and styles.” \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eBookRiot\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“Brockmeier's 100 extremely short ghost stories present a range in tone from unsettling to terrifying, and pack a fearful punch with an economy of language, even for readers primed to feel uneasy. . . . The tales themselves are gems: modern, haunted treasures to be discovered.” \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eBooklist\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“Brockmeier's world has a perpetual hum of oddity, a numinous glow. He's a master of defamiliarizing the everyday, of what the Russians call \"making strange.\" . . . Varied, inventive, uncanny, and playful: a gifted fabulist's cabinet of curiosities, his book-length memento mori.” \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eKirkus Reviews\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“Sonorous. . . . Brockmeier’s luminous sentences and potent metaphors animate the phantasmagorical material. These eloquent dispatches show the writer’s remarkable range.” \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublishers Weekly\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“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.” \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—Kelly Link, author of \u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003e Get in Trouble\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“The Ghost Variations\u003c\/i\u003e 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.”\u003cb\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e—\u003c\/i\u003eCarmen Maria Machado, author of\u003ci\u003e Her Body and Other Parties\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“\u003ci\u003eThe Ghost Variations\u003c\/i\u003e 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.” \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—Karen Russell, author of \u003ci\u003eOrange World and Other Stories\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “In Kevin Brockmeier’s \u003ci\u003eThe Ghost Variations\u003c\/i\u003e, 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.” \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—Benjamin Percy, author of \u003ci\u003eRed Moon\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cb\u003eKEVIN BROCKMEIER\u003c\/b\u003e is the author of the memoir \u003ci\u003eA Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip;\u003c\/i\u003e the novels \u003ci\u003eThe Illumination, The Brief History of the Dead,\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eThe Truth About Celia;\u003c\/i\u003e the story collections \u003ci\u003eThe Ghost Variations, Things That Fall from the Sky \u003c\/i\u003eand \u003ci\u003eThe View from the Seventh Layer;\u003c\/i\u003e and the children’s novels \u003ci\u003eCity of Names and Grooves: A Kind of Mystery\u003c\/i\u003e. His work has been translated into seventeen languages. He teaches frequently at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and lives in Little Rock, Arkansas, where he was raised.\u003ci\u003eSEVENTY \u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eA MAN IN THE MIRROR\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e That woman in the owl-eye glasses leads a life of secrecy and ritual. In the morning before she leaves for work, and in the evening before she goes to sleep, she always spends two hours staring into the mirror by her front door: four hours total, each and every day, without fail. For years this has been her habit, though not, as you might suspect, because she loves her own reflection. Her nose roosts too low on her face, for one thing. Her chin is too broad and bony. And her freckles, once her best feature, have gone gray along with her hair. No, when she addresses the mirror, she does so at an angle, gazing not \u003ci\u003eat \u003c\/i\u003eherself but \u003ci\u003epast \u003c\/i\u003eherself. Some years ago, on her way out the door, she was adjusting the pendant on her necklace when a sudden glassiness of motion caught her eye. At first she mistook it for a flaw in the mirror’s silver. Then the flaw startled her by roping its arms over its head and opening its mouth in a helpless yawn, so recognizably human and yet so obviously immaterial that she knew at once that it—that \u003ci\u003ehe\u003c\/i\u003e—was a ghost. \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Every day since then, as if by appointment, she has watched the ghost’s comings and goings. Only in the small Venetian mirror by the front door does she see him, and even then only occasionally, when his activities happen to intersect with the living room, the hallway, or the outermost edge of her kitchen. Now and then he behaves with what seems to be affection toward what seem to be people, knitting his fingers around as if tying a ribbon in someone’s hair, for instance, or rocking back and forth as if embracing someone from behind. From this she has judged that he has a wife and daughter, though they have never, as he has, taken shape in the silver. Once, nearly a decade ago, upon a rainy April eight a.m., he approached the mirror to inspect his teeth. He was channeling a fingernail between his incisors when he accidentally met her eyes. For a few seconds, as his face did something curious, her knees locked and her toes began to tingle. Her heart seemed to beat at the same lazy pace as the world. She realized she was in love. Ever since then, she has been waiting for it to happen again.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e On the first Saturday of each month, the woman in the owl-eye glasses puts on her best silk blouse and her pressed denim skirt and heads out for lunch with her friend the manicurist, who works in a little shop across the street. Last week, over burgers and fries, she almost told her about the ghost. Instead, though, she confessed a different secret altogether: how she fantasizes, and often, about erasing the past fifty years of her life and starting over again, awakening as she used to be, a skinny girl with red hair and freckles, whose decisions had not yet been made, whose rituals had not yet been established, and who could never imagine that fifty years later, in her loneliness and disappointment, she would long to trade her life away. “Are you,” her friend asked in a voice of almost unbearable sympathy, “seeing someone?”","brand":"Pantheon","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46304356827365,"sku":"NP9781524748838","price":28.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781524748838.jpg?v=1767739504","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/the-ghost-variations-isbn-9781524748838","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}