Practice for Becoming a Ghost

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.