Few books arrive with the quiet confidence of The Ghostly Silence of the American Northeast. From its first page, the author writes as though the only honest sentence is the one already on the table.

A 48-page meditation on gothic realism, with new verse from Elena Vance and the Murakami interview in full.

The prose moves like weather. Sentences gather, break, gather again. What looks at first like restraint is, on closer reading, a kind of generosity — the writer trusting the reader to feel the storm without being shown the lightning.

A Letter, Long Withheld

There are passages in this book that ask to be read twice, not because they are difficult, but because the first reading is too occupied with surprise to register the music underneath.

“It is the rare novel that grows larger as it grows quieter.”

Plot, in the conventional sense, is almost beside the point. What propels the pages is closer to attention — the writer's, then ours — turning over the ordinary until it gives up its odd, persistent light.

There are passages in this book that ask to be read twice, not because they are difficult, but because the first reading is too occupied with surprise to register the music underneath.

A Question of Form

Plot, in the conventional sense, is almost beside the point. What propels the pages is closer to attention — the writer's, then ours — turning over the ordinary until it gives up its odd, persistent light.

By the time the final chapter arrives, the author has earned every quiet thing the book attempts. Few writers working today are doing so with this much patience, or this little vanity.