Ghost Stories: A Memoir
May 2026 · Simon and Schuster
Ebook
320
Pages
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Eligible
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infoThis book will become available on May 5, 2026. You will not be charged until it is released.
About this ebook
A searing memoir of love and grief centered around the loss of Siri Hustvedt’s husband, Paul Auster.
Ghost Stories is an intimate meditation on grief, memory, and enduring love, written after the death of Siri Hustvedt’s husband, Paul Auster. The book includes personal, never-seen-before writing by Auster—letters 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 years—the tragic deaths of Hustvedt’s 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 meditates on the things and papers Auster left behind, reflects on the forty-three years they spent together, and on 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.
Ghost Stories is an intimate meditation on grief, memory, and enduring love, written after the death of Siri Hustvedt’s husband, Paul Auster. The book includes personal, never-seen-before writing by Auster—letters 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 years—the tragic deaths of Hustvedt’s 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 meditates on the things and papers Auster left behind, reflects on the forty-three years they spent together, and on 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.
About the author
Siri Hustvedt is the author of a book of poetry, four collections of essays, two works of nonfiction, and seven novels, including the international bestsellers What I Loved and The Summer Without Men. Her novel The Blazing World was longlisted for the Booker Prize and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for fiction. Her many other awards include the Princess of Asturias Prize, the European Essay Prize and the Gabarron International Award for Thought and Humanities. She has a PhD in English from Columbia University and is a lecturer in psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York. Her work has been translated into more than thirty languages.
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