Ghost Stories

A searing memoir of love and grief centered around the loss of Siri Hustvedts husband, Paul Auster. "Genuinely moving...Hustvedts book is like Didions [The Year of Magical Thinking] in tone...a grainy and resonant book about loneliness, despair, and confusion. Its close to a howl." The New York Times Book Review Ghost Stories is an intimate meditation on grief, memory, and enduring love, written after the death of Siri Hustvedts husband, Paul Auster. The book includes personal, never-before-seen writing by Austerletters and notes to Siri and his last unfinished book addressed to his grandson, Letters to Miles. The memoir is both an elegy and a reckoning, a chronicle of personal loss that also bears witness to the sorrows of recent yearsthe tragic deaths of Hustvedts stepson and granddaughter. Hustvedt explores how grief unmoors time, how the intimacy of a shared life continues to mark the everyday, and how the body experiences the absence of love as a presence. She reflects on the things and papers Auster left behind, the forty-three years they spent together, the rituals of mourning, and the nature of language, memory, and the self. Part memoir, part philosophical inquiry, Ghost Stories is unflinching, tender, and wise. It is a story of a woman haunting her own life, and the ghosts that inhabit us even as we carry on.

Pages: 320, Hardcover, Simon & Schuster