Ghosting - Softcover

Gann, Kirby

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1935439472 ISBN 13: 9781935439479

Publisher: Ig Publishing, 2012

Synopsis

A dying drug kingpin enslaved to the memory of his dead wife; a young woman torn between a promising future and the hardscrabble world she grew up in; a mother willing to do anything to fuel her addiction to pills; and her youngest son, searching for the truth behind his older brother's disappearance, are just some of the unforgettable characters that populate Ghosting, Kirby Gann's lush and lyrical novel of family and community, and the ties that can both bond and betray.

Fleece Skaggs has disappeared, along with drug dealer Lawrence Gruel's reefer harvest. Deciding that the best way to discover what happened to his older brother is to take his place as a drug runner for Gruel, James Cole plunges into a dark underworld of drugs, violence, and long hidden family secrets, where discovering what happened to his brother could cost him his life.

A genre-subverting literary mystery told from the alternating viewpoint of different characters, Ghosting is both a simple quest for the truth—what exactly happened to Fleece Skaggs?—and a complex consideration of human frailty.

About this title

About the Author:

Kirby Gann is the author of the novels The Barbarian Parade (Hill Street Press, 2004) and Our Napoleon in Rags (Ig Publishing, April 2005). He is also co-editor (with poet Kristin Herbert) of the anthology A Fine Excess: Contemporary Literature at Play, which was a finalist for the ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Award (Anthologies). His short fiction has appeared in Witness and The Best of Witness, The Crescent Review, American Writing, The Louisville Review, The Southeast Review, and The Southern Indiana Review, among other journals. He is the recipient of an Individual Artist Fellowship and two Professional Assistance Awards from the Kentucky Arts Council, and an Honorable Mention in The Pushcart Prize Anthology. Gann is Managing Editor at Sarabande Books, and teaches in the brief-residency MFA in Writing Program at Spalding University.

From Booklist:

When his older brother, Fleece, disappears, along with a substantial load of local drug-kingpin Lawrence Gruel’s marijuana, James Cole sees no way out other than to step into his brother’s shoes, running bottles and blunts for a backwoods Kentucky drug empire. His mother, a hard-core prescription-pill addict whose reasoning skills have long ago been shot to hell, had been pressuring him, peppering him with her addled notions of family obligation. Although much of what Cole sees frightens him, especially his obese, fatally ill boss and his menacing partner, Cole feels he must learn what he can about what happened to his brother, despite his own ambitions to leave Kentucky far behind by working as a diver for the oil companies. In addition, Cole is hopelessly in love with a college girl whose family life looks like another world, since his own family history is marked by violence and cruelty. Although Gann’s ornate style sometimes gets in the way of his gritty story, patient readers will feel the full weight of this mournful tale of a doomed family with ill-conceived notions of loyalty. --Joanne Wilkinson

About this edition

• Publisher: Ig Publishing
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 1935439472
• ISBN 13: 9781935439479
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 286