Practice for Becoming a Ghost

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.