This Year's Ghost - by Michael Chin (Paperback)

About the Book

This Year's Ghost is a surprising and insightful collection that will leave readers unsettled in the very best way.

Book Synopsis

In This Year's Ghost, the dead, the impossible, and the unthinkable gather-not to be ignored, not trifled with, and they will break your heart at every turn. Absurd, hilarious, and carnal, these are everyday ghost stories. Ghosts are the living, and we are the spirits inhabiting their journeys through all that it is to be human. Jason Teal, the author of We Were Called Specimens, says This Year's Ghost is "A triumphant collection of stories by a writer whose strong vision balances the darkness and light of our modern world refreshingly and enchantingly. This Year's Ghost's worlds of puzzles and heartbreak may often contain fantastic beings and futuristic technologies, but they capture the ubiquitous need for connection and affirmation at the core of human experience. Michael Chin is a highly transportive writer whose other books should move to the top of your queue immediately afterwards."

Review Quotes

In This Year's Ghost, Michael Chin builds each story from the cleverest of premises-ghost subscription service! life without dogs! boys made of stone!-sinking readers immediately into not-quite, just-off worlds and then moving us beyond cleverness to insight, truth, love. I admire especially Chin's tender balance of charm and sincerity. This collection will haunt me, and my fiction-writing classroom, for ages.

-Jennifer A. Howard, author of Flat Stanly Reports to His Third Grader and You on Mars: Failed Sci-Fi Stories

Michael Chin examines everyday relationships and emotions through the lens of fantastical, unexpected, and often deeply strange situations -- reframing the struggles of adolescence in a world where children are made of stone and glass, transforming the pain of first love and lost friendship through a tale at clown college, and asking what someone who can access all the answers in the universe would truly want to know most. This Year's Ghost is a surprising and insightful collection that will leave readers unsettled in the very best way.

-Tara Karr Roberts, author of Wild and Distant Seas

While the plots of these wildly imagined stories will captivate the reader-a company that rents out ghosts; a teenager who has a crush on a girl made of glass; a slot machine where you bet on a percentage of the life you have left-the real magic is in Michael Chin's ability to go beyond a story's premise and deliver insights about identity, love, and loss. These weird and wonderful stories will enchant and enthrall, while sneakily delivering a dose of insight and humor.

-Susan Jackson Rodgers, author of This Must Be The Place