Guestbook

Description

“Reading [Guestbook] feels akin to walking through an art exhibit, each piece linked in ways that are ineffable but clear. . . yearning, like a ghost, lingers long after the stories are done.” –NPR

One of our most imaginative writers and artists explores the visitations that haunt us in the midst of life, and reinvents the very way we narrate experience.

A tennis prodigy collapses after his wins, crediting them to an invisible, not entirely benevolent presence. A series of ghosts appear at their former bedsides, some distraught, some fascinated, to witness their unfamiliar occupants. A woman returns from a visit to Alcatraz with an uncomfortable feeling. The spirit of a prisoner has attached himself to you, a friend tells her. He sensed the sympathy you had for those men. In more than two dozen stories and vignettes, accompanied by an evocative curiosity cabinet of artifacts and images, Guestbook beckons us through the glimmering, unsettling evidence that marks our paths in life.“Reading [Guestbook] feels akin to walking through an art exhibit, each piece linked in ways that are ineffable but clear. . . Guestbook blurs the lines between haunting and reality. . . Certainly, Shapton suffuses both art and text with longing. . . That yearning, like a ghost, lingers long after the stories are done.” —NPR

“The exquisite minimalism that defines Shapton’s style hews much closer to verse than prose. Shapton’s thoughtful layout of text and her use of images sets a deliberate, poetic pace. She invites her readers to slow down, to linger, to let the language percolate . . . Through the immersive, wholly original reading experience of Guestbook, Shapton has bested herself yet again, masterfully elevating the ghost story form to new heights.” -LA Review of Books

“Strange in the way that being haunted must inevitably be strange . . . Guestbook is best appreciated as a portable art installation. The book is enigmatic at every turn, but gorgeously realized. It pushes the boundaries of both ‘ghost’ and ‘story,’ and the discomfort that it creates crawls beyond the covers of the book and into the mind, haunting long after the last page.” –New York Journal of Books

“A mesmerizing pastiche of found photos, original art, and dinner party anecdotes that answer the question ‘What haunts us?’ with evidence so chilling, you’ll keep flipping through the fear.” –Martha Stewart Living
 
“Shapton combines found and original visuals with unsettling, evocative stories to capture the sensation of what it feels like to try to remember a dream upon waking.” –Harper’s Bazaar

“Persistently uncanny . . . Shapton’s prose will leave you craving more… tactile, mysterious and seductive.” – The Guardian

“The writing and images are equal parts funny, spooky, and devastating, and by the time I was done reading I felt haunted myself.” –The Rumpus

“Part evidence log, part crime scrapbook, part secret diary, part lost family photo album, Leanne Shapton’s Guestbook is a mesmerizing collection of texts and images that builds more like a symphony than a novel. Each distinct chapter . . . elevates the traditional ghost story into an art form.” –Interview Magazine

“Trained as an art director, each of Shapton’s books are carefully constructed objects . . . Shapton’s stories create wells of meaning from the shadows cast by items left behind; these hauntings, full of memories and longings, are visceral . . . Guestbook is a melancholy ode to people lost and a celebration of what they leave behind.” –Brooklyn Rail

“Full of unconventional storytelling. . . Guestbook also has wonderful moments of humor that reminds us that just because we are being haunted, doesn’t mean we can’t laugh.” –FLAUNT Magazine

“Entirely original . . . Shapton ekes ghostly mystery out of few words . . .  Like the spiritual world that inspired it, Guestbook draws eerie, tantalizing power from moments of confusion. It throws into question the meanings of what we read and what we think we see.” –Hyperallergic

“Perfectly uncanny . . . unsettling us in sometimes terrifying and sometimes exhilarating ways. Shapton’s words are interwoven with images of art and artifacts, adding to the surreal aura of each of the stories, reminding us of the always pulsing energy that imbues nearly everything around us, always, whether we feel it right away or not.” –NYLON

“What makes this new collection so remarkable is what occurs off the page, in the blank places between its sparse text and its abundant images . . .  These stories are irreducible and insoluble, and that’s their glory.” –TOR.com

“The multitalented Leanne Shapton presents us with another unclassifiable treasure! Guestbook is a collection of stories . . . narrated in Shapton’s inimitably offbeat style.” –Largehearted Boy

“This clever and evocative volume…collects ghost stories ranging from the eerie to the tender . . . Shapton inventively explores the space between presence and absence, craftily blending images and text to articulate what cannot be explained, only sensed, making for a uniquely haunting and uncanny work.” –Publishers Weekly
 
“A surreal look at everyday happenings, which is sure to leave you feeling uneasy in a good way.” –Domino Magazine

“Diffuse and eerie . . . We may not always get to see the lives of others, Shapton seems to say, but still they were here. A strange and haunting art project.” –Kirkus Reviews

“’Ghost’ is a good word for all the nameless longing that doesn’t get resolved in this lifetime. Shapton has created a mystical territory — a performance, an exhibition,  a guestbook — in which I felt the ghost within myself; the thing that will outlive me. A fearless and exquisite book.”
– Miranda July, filmmaker, artist, and bestselling author of No One Belongs Here More Than You and The First Bad Man
 
“Guestbook reveals Shapton as a ventriloquist, a diviner, a medium, a force, a witness, a goof, and above all, a gift. One of the smartest, most moving, most unexpected books I have read in a very long time.” – Rivka Galchen, author of Atmospheric Disturbances and Little Labors

“Leanne Shapton has a way of making books entirely new, surreal, and uncanny, always experimenting with the ways image and text can be mixed to tell new stories, in new ways. Guestbook is a delicious haunting and leaves one with a chill of recognition for how we live as ghosts in this distant, distracted, and image-obsessed time.” – Sheila Heti, Motherhood and How Should a Person Be?Leanne Shapton is an artist and author of several books, including Swimming Studies (winner of the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography), Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, and a coauthor of the New York Times-bestselling Women in Clothes. She is also the cofounder of J&L Books, a nonprofit publisher of art and photography books. She lives in New York City.He told me twice about the visitation, once soon after it happened and then again something like thirteen years later. The first time he told me, we were outside and it was cold and I didn’t listen very well. I think I thought to myself: Huh, that’s weird.

The second time he told me, we were inside and we had finished our spaghetti and were drinking some red wine he had brought over, and this time I listened. I listened and heard him try to describe how, suddenly, she was there. We’d both had children by then and were not as close, and though we were lost in some ways, we were not as confused as before.

He told me that suddenly she was there and they had been talking for some time.They were in his studio apartment, and though he couldn’t exactly see her, she was there and seemed to be the same age as she’d been when she died. Which was thirty-three, the age he was then, too. And they were both so lonely and they talked about how she had had babies to be less lonely and for the company and they laughed together at that. He said they just laughed and laughed. And he knew her and he liked her and he loved her.

She had died when he was ten, and most of his memories came from a film a friend of his mother’s had made about her. The filmmaker was a family friend and a famous poet. Famous in Canada.

When the visitation happened, he was living on the Upper East Side and didn’t see much of anyone. He drank.

He said they talked for a couple of hours. The space he lived in was small. It had a platform bed and she was there suddenly, she was impressed and happy that he was living in New York City and she said that she didn’t understand how computers could be so important and how she could see bodies on the radio. Then just as suddenly she was not there anymore and he cried and cried.US