Guestbook: Ghost Stories
By Leanne Shapton
Riverhead Books, 2019
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Description
"Reading [Guestbook] feels akin to walking through an art exhibit, each piece linked in ways that are ineffable but clear. . . yearning, like a ghost, lingers long after the stories are done." --NPR
One of our most imaginative writers and artists explores the visitations that haunt us in the midst of life, and reinvents the very way we narrate experience.
A tennis prodigy collapses after his wins, crediting them to an invisible, not entirely benevolent presence. A series of ghosts appear at their former bedsides, some distraught, some fascinated, to witness their unfamiliar occupants. A woman returns from a visit to Alcatraz with an uncomfortable feeling. The spirit of a prisoner has attached himself to you, a friend tells her. He sensed the sympathy you had for those men. In more than two dozen stories and vignettes, accompanied by an evocative curiosity cabinet of artifacts and images, Guestbook beckons us through the glimmering, unsettling evidence that marks our paths in life.
Reviews
“Reading [Guestbook] feels akin to walking through an art exhibit, each piece linked in ways that are ineffable but clear. . . Guestbook blurs the lines between haunting and reality. . . Certainly, Shapton suffuses both art and text with longing. . . That yearning, like a ghost, lingers long after the stories are done.” —NPR
“The exquisite minimalism that defines Shapton’s style hews much closer to verse than prose. Shapton’s thoughtful layout of text and her use of images sets a deliberate, poetic pace. She invites her readers to slow down, to linger, to let the language percolate . . . Through the immersive, wholly original reading experience of Guestbook, Shapton has bested herself yet again, masterfully elevating the ghost story form to new heights.” -LA Review of Books
“Strange in the way that being haunted must inevitably be strange . . . Guestbook is best appreciated as a portable art installation. The book is enigmatic at every turn, but gorgeously realized. It pushes the boundaries of both ‘ghost’ and ‘story,’ and the discomfort that it creates crawls beyond the covers of the book and into the mind, haunting long after the last page.” –New York Journal of Books
About The Author
Leanne Shapton is an artist and author of several books, including Swimming Studies (winner of the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography), Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, and a coauthor of the New York Times-bestselling Women in Clothes. She is also the cofounder of J&L Books, a nonprofit publisher of art and photography books. She lives in New York City.
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