St Anne's Fellow, Prof. Patrick McGuinness, publishes new book: Ghost

St Anne’s Fellow, Professor Patrick McGuiness, has this week published a new book, Ghost Stations: Essays and Branchlines.

The book contains several of his London Review of Books essays on place and memory, on the monstering of his former teacher Chris Jefferies, on elusive Romanian poets, the ‘Poet’s Novel’, Mallarmé, Poetry and Terrorism, Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul, the Isle of Sheppey, French and Belgian art, and the other side of Oxford.

It can be ordered from CB Editions here.

Many congratulations to Patrick!

Patrick McGuinness writes in Ghost Stations about his personal history, the unofficial histories of places in which he has lived, and some of the lesser known byways of European literature and art. He re-opens branchlines closed for ‘efficiency’. He notices the extraordinary hiding in plain sight – in the local, the mundane. His book is an act of resistance and modest, undogmatic revelation.

‘McGuinness celebrates an ordinariness so entrenched as to seem supernatural . . . Under McGuinness’s attention all this, and all the other glimpsed and overheard life, become fascinating, charming, poignant, comic, daft at times, and absolutely deserving of the effort to preserve and transmit an intimate strangeness.’
– Sean O’Brien

‘Patrick McGuinness writes … with Proustian élan and Nabokovian delight.’
– John Banville

‘A multitalented writer . . . The balance, charm and wit of the writing are remarkable.’
– Kate Kellaway, Observer

‘McGuinness has a delightfully distinctive voice . . . His buoyant imagination always carries the day.’
– Claire Harman, TLS

‘His prose, like his poetry, is a marvel to behold . . . one of the finest British authors of his generation.’
– New Republic