ISBN: 9798990379800
Forthcoming: August 1, 2024

PRACTICE FOR BECOMING A GHOST

Stories by Patrick Thomas Henry

Winner of the 2022 Northeast Modern Language Association Creative Writing Book Award.

Semi-finalist in the 2023 Iron Horse Literary Review First Book Prize.

Stories from this collection have previously appeared in Carolina Quarterly, Clarion, Coal Hill Review, Duende, The Evansville Review, Fiction Southeast, Lake Effect, LandLocked, Longleaf Review, Northville Review, Porcupine Literary, and West Branch Wired.

In these sixteen fabulist stories, debut author Patrick Thomas Henry treads the line between the real and the fantastic, conjuring the ghosts that haunt both our past and our present. A father whispers to his dead wife as his daughters row off course and their boat begins to capsize. Staff writers at a failing publication watch as the people around them are slowly transformed into magpies, cardinals, and mourning doves. A woman summons stories from the textures of bird seed, feathers, nests, and craft-store yarn. In the title story, a lawyer falls in love with a graphic designer who asks him to pretend that she is invisible to everyone but him.

From Washington, D.C. to rural Pennsylvania to the nineteenth-century Irish countryside, the stories in this collection grapple with grief and the fundamental truth that the act of living is always, inevitably, practice for becoming a ghost.

Portrait of Patrick Thomas Henry, author and assistant professor of creative writing at the University of North Dakota.

Patrick Thomas Henry

Patrick Thomas Henry is the fiction and poetry editor for Modern Language Studies. His short fiction has appeared in publications including Superstition Review, West Branch online, Sundog, Carolina Quarterly, and Lake Effect, among many others. His essays have appeared in North Dakota Quarterly, Michigan Quarterly Review, Essay Daily, The Millions, and elsewhere. His work was also selected for inclusion in Best Microfiction 2020. He is an assistant professor and coordinator of creative writing at the University of North Dakota. You can find him on Twitter @Patrick_T_Henry and online at patrickthomashenry.com.

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