“Sharp to the point of being piercing, these tales are part of the best tradition of satirical literature.”
—Horacio Castellanos Moya, author of Senselessness
A wry, propulsive, visceral collection of stories about the afterlives of utopia, imagined and real, from the author of the Writers’ Trust Prize-winning Siege 13.
Fleeing communist Budapest by air balloon, a wrestler tries to reinvent himself in Canada. On a formal invitation from the Party's General Secretary, a Belgian bureaucrat “defects” to communist Hungary, chasing the dream of a better world. Meanwhile, a provocateur filmmaker drinks and blasts his way to a final, celluloid confrontation with fascism, while an enfant terrible philosopher works on his prophetic, posthumously panned masterpiece, Dyschrony. These are among the decadent and absurd characters who hover around the promise and failure of utopia across the pages of Ghost Geographies.
A polyphonic descendant of Kadare, Bolaño, and Sebald, Tamas Dobozy masterfully traces and thwarts the porous borders between fact, fiction, ideology, history and humor. The stories that make up Ghost Geographies simply confirm that, in the words of the Washington Post, Tamas Dobozy's “approaches to telling stories, and his commitment not only to provoke thought but to entertain, constitute a virtuoso performance.”

Tamas Dobozy was born in Nanaimo, BC, and has spent much of his life on the West Coast, in Powell River, Victoria, and Vancouver. He has also lived in Toronto, Montreal, and Budapest, Hungary. His work has been published in journals throughout North America, and in 1995 he won the annual sub-TERRAIN short fiction contest. After receiving his PhD in English from the University of British Columbia, he moved to St. John`s, Newfoundland, to teach full time in the Department of Language and Literature at Memorial University. His first book was Doggone. He was nominated for the prestigous Pushcart Prize for his story "Tales of a Hungarian Resistance". When X Equals Marylou was also been shortlisted for the Danuta Gleed Award.

Tamas Dobozy's profile page

"Dobozy’s stories are experimental, without descending into self-indulgent playfulness or too-clever-by-half metafiction. Stylistic brilliance binds them, and Dobozy is incapable of writing slack or dull prose [. . .] Ghost Geographies, a follow-up to Dobozy’s award-winning Siege 13, has flown under the radar in Canada. That’s a shame, an injustice. In a perfect, utopian world, these stories would be front and centre on the literary map of 2021."
— Jason Blake, Central European journal of Canadian studies (Vol 16)

"Stupendous, singular, impeccable all describe Tamas Dobozy’s new book Ghost Geographies — so do complex, demanding and comic.”
— Brett Josef Grubisic, Toronto Star

Advance praise for Ghost Geographies:

“In Tamas Dobozy's Ghost Geographies I hear echoes of those great writers from East Europe trapped in totalitarianism, like Slawomir Mrozec, Ismail Kadare, Milan Kundera, among others. Sharp to the point of being piercing, these tales are part of the best tradition of satirical literature.”
— Horacio Castellanos Moya, author of Senselessness

Ghost Geographies dramatizes the displacing effects of power, both real and imagined. For our enrichment, and to his credit, Tamas Dobozy surveys with efficacy and feeling the intractable human spirit caught in the middle, rescuing some of the lost and unlucky, marooned on an alien continent that is no place."
— Dustin Cole, BCBookLook