Winner of the 2023 Osprey Award for Fiction.
Now available from Middle Creek Publishing.
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The Ghost Town Collectives masterfully explores the delicate intricacies of human experience through a series of short stories that blend poetic prose with magical realism. Each narrative unravels like a ball of mystery, revealing the unique perspectives of its characters and offering profound insights into their internal dialogues and personal mythologies. Set against the backdrop of the Anthropocene, Corrigan’s stories reflect contemporary ecological and social challenges, from rising sea levels to societal shifts demanding new innovations and vulnerabilities. These stories serve as way stations of small mysteries, providing a remedy to the pervasive eco-grief of our time and inviting readers to find beauty and intrigue in both the natural and the fantastical. With moments of profound reflection akin to the pause between breaths, Corrigan’s work resonates deeply, offering a poetic theater to the subtle processes of human life.
Praise for The Ghost Town Collectives:
“The Ghost Town Collectives collects wonderful, unpredictable tales of loss—lost relationships, lost climates and landscapes, lost possibilities and yet they are always infused with hope and empathy. Caught between the prehistoric and the dystopian future, these protagonists range from human to animal to plant, from the extinct to the mythological to the cryptid. Never played for shock value, always treated with respect; the measured, vivid prose pulls us in, makes us believe in whatever Brittney Corrigan’s imagination conjures. Polar bear point-of-view? Yes, please. An auction house that could manifest anywhere, depending on the item up for sale? Show me. A tortured orchard? Terrifying. A mammoth brought back by de-extinction? I’m in.”
~ Peter Rock, author of My Abandonment, The Night Swimmers, and Passersthrough
“Folding back the cover of Brittney Corrigan’s stunning collection, The Ghost Town Collectives, is like parting the mist of a waterfall to reveal another world that is both entirely familiar and like nothing you’ve ever seen. Extinction, pandemics, natural disasters, and the resurrection of species abound in this collection. And woven throughout are the most tender of human hands, seeking to undo the damage of our species’ recklessness. Haunting, elegiac, and deeply moving, this collection is vital reading for our transforming world.”
~ Talia Lakshmi Kolluri, author of What We Fed to the Manticore
“Brittney Corrigan’s The Ghost Town Collectives is an inventive and lyrical knock-out of a collection. With a poet’s attention to language, an artist’s attention to image, a scientist’s curiosity about the wider natural world, and a folklorist’s joy in the strange stories of our shared imagination, Corrigan has written gem after gem here. Reminding the reader of both Andrea Barrett and Karen Joy Fowler, these stories illuminate the intersections between human relationships, the natural world, and the surreal and fascinating territory of the uncanny.”
~ Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum, author of Elita and What We Do with the Wreckage
“Brittney Corrigan’s warm, compelling prose captivates from the first sentence. Surprising and delightfully intelligent, The Ghost Town Collectives inhabits a world that ranges wide with Corrigan’s imagination. Big-hearted people and creatures inhabit these thirteen stories where science, magic, and morality meet up with both the all-too-familiar and the impossibly unknown. The Ghost Town Collectives reminds us, no matter our species or situation, we are all built to survive. So find a tether of hope and hang on for what might yet still be possible.”
~ Margaret Malone, author of People Like You
Brittney Corrigan 