Ghost Stories

by Jack Ross

David Foster Wallace once wrote that 'every love story is a ghost story.' Not all of the stories in Jack Ross’s new collection are about love, but certainly, all of them concern ghosts – imaginary, real, or entirely absent. As it turns out, there are even stranger things in the from haunted hotel rooms in Beijing to drunken poetry readings on Auckland’s North Shore. Or perhaps, as the Mayan prophets foresaw, the world really did end on the 21st December, 2012, and 'all bets are off, all the rules have changed, and – new Adams, new Eves – we have to find the courage somehow to start naming the strange new things we see.' 'There’s no one in New Zealand literature exploring the dark ways of narrative with the alchemical touch of Jack Ross, and his gift of spinning tales which jump "from track to track on the time-space continuum" never fails to leave me exhilarated, in outright awe'. - Tracey Slaughter Jack Ross works as a senior lecturer in creative writing at Massey University. He is the author of five poetry collections, four novels and three books of short fiction. His novel The Annotated Tree Worship was highly commended in the 2018 NZSA Heritage Book Awards. He has also edited numerous books, anthologies, and literary journals, including brief, Landfall, and Poetry New Zealand. He blogs at

155 pages, Kindle Edition

Published December 1, 2020

About the author

Jack Ross retired from his job as Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Massey University in 2022. He has published six books of poems, three novellas, three novels - Nights with Giordano Bruno (2000), The Imaginary Museum of Atlantis (2006) and EMO (2008) - and three collections of short fiction, most recently Haunts (2024). Ross has also edited a number of anthologies and literary journals, including Landfall and Poetry New Zealand.

Michael Steven has described him as a "maverick translator", while Michael Morrissey had this to say about him: "Tired of airport books? Bored by Tom Clancy and Dan Brown? Wearied by puerile web sites? Seeking a challenge? Try a 'novel' by Dr Jack Ross" -- Investigate.

His novel-as-twin-novellas, The Annotated Tree Worship (2017), was highly commended in the 2018 NZSA Heritage Book Awards. He blogs at mairangibay.blogspot.com.