The Library Cosmic: Stories

The child lies in the snowy north, where the halls of essays are heavy with the thoughts of poets and politicians and philosophers. There are no flowers for her. There is only a gathering of found family, who stand uncertain in the Librarian’s shadow.

In this fabulous and moving collection of short stories Ben Berman Ghan traverses time, space and the written word to consider the mysteries of life. From ghosts to golems to far future AIs these stories ask the big questions: What is consciousness? What gives a being its soul? What are the boundaries of love? And, perhaps most importantly, how will libraries save us all?

Ben Berman Ghan is the author of The Years Shall Run Like Rabbits (Buckrider Books 2024), as well as Behold the Dead (Anstruther Press 2025), Visitation Seeds (845 Press 2020) and What We See in the Smoke (Crowsnest Books 2019). His prose, poetry and criticism have previously been published in Clarkesworld Magazine, Strange Horizons, The Ex-Puritan and Ancillary Review of Books, and have been reprinted in such anthologies as Year’s Best Canadian Fantasy and Science Fiction and Year’s Best Science Fiction on Earth. His work has won the Foreword INDIES Silver Medal for Science Fiction, was longlisted for the Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Literature of the Fantastic and has been a semifinalist for the Small Spec Book Award for Science Fiction. He is a grateful recipient of the Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity’s Science Fiction Writers’ Residence and is a PhD Candidate in English and creative writing at the University of Calgary, where he lives with his partner and two cats.