Ghost Stories

David Foster Wallace once wrote that "every love story is a ghost story."

Not all of the stories in Jack Ross's new collection are about love, but certainly all of them concern ghosts - imaginary, real, or entirely absent. As it turns out, there are even stranger things in the world: from haunted hotel rooms in Beijing to drunken poetry readings on Auckland's North Shore.

Or perhaps, as the Mayan prophets foresaw, the world really did end on the 21st December, 2012, and "all bets are off, all the rules have changed, and - new Adams, new Eves - we have to find the courage somehow to start naming the strange new things we see."