Kim Samek w/ Josh Riedel, I AM THE GHOST HERE: STORIES

Writer and television producer Kim Samek discusses her debut collection I Am the Ghost Here: Stories, in which twelve women confront the mounting existential terrors of modern life. Warm, endlessly strange, and filled with dark yet hopeful humor, I Am the Ghost Here casts familiar crises of contemporary life in a wholly unique light, offering a pathway towards our shared humanity even as reality comes crumbling down. She is joined by Portland writer Josh Riedel.

A woman's limbs disappear into “the cloud” during wildfire-induced power outages. A lonely DoorDasher accidentally becomes the star of someone else's reality show, forced to resolve her fraught relationship with her immigrant mother for the narrative. Succumbing to a widely denied pandemic, a gymnastics coach must carry her heart around in a Mason jar, using her disability to become an influencer. Two chronically single, chronically ill people become soulmates, only to discover their meeting was algorithmically orchestrated by ad tech. Other dramas unfold as icebergs melt and island-sized trash heaps burn.

Threaded with sharp social commentary, these stories question the engineering of human connection through technology, social media, and reality television. Warm, endlessly strange, and filled with dark yet hopeful humor, I Am the Ghost Here casts familiar crises of contemporary life in a wholly unique light, offering a pathway towards our shared humanity even as reality comes crumbling down.

Kim Samek is a half-Thai Emmy-nominated writer and television producer with credits including MTV's Catfish and PBS' WordGirl. She studied German Literature and creative writing at Stanford University. Her stories appear in Guernica, Ecotone, Electric Literature, The North American Review, The Chicago Quarterly Review, swamp pink, Gulf Coast, The Southern Humanities Review, The Threepenny Review, Story, and ZYZZYVA. Her short fiction has won a Pushcart Prize. A native of Seattle, she lives in Los Angeles.

Josh Riedel is the author of the novel Please Report Your Bug Here, called a “sharp literary thriller” by The New York Times and selected as an Amazon Editors’ Pick in “Best Science Fiction & Fantasy.” The recipient of fellowships from MacDowell and Yaddo, his writing appears in Esquire, Electric Literature, Joyland, and One Story, among others. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

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