Guest Book

****slightly damaged*****

“The short story is an arena – or a literary gym – where writers can flex muscles that might seem out of place in a novel. Leanne Shapton has tremendous form in both genres, in fact, but her collection Guestbook (Particular Books) pushes the envelope in the most beguiling, clever and provocative ways. Full of images, photos, wrapping paper, competing texts, and meta-meta-fictional fun and games, it’s a mind-bending celebration of the form’s potential.” – William Boyd, New Statesman, Books of the Year 2019

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.