• The Library Cosmic

The Library Cosmic

by Ben Berman Ghan

May 19, 2026 | ISBN 978-1-998408-41-2 | 250 Pages

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The child lies in the snowy north, where the halls of essays are heavy with the thoughts of poets and politicians and philosophers. There are no flowers for her. There is only a gathering of found family, who stand uncertain in the Librarian’s shadow.

In this fabulous and moving collection of short stories Benjamin Berman Ghan traverses time, space and the written word to consider the mysteries of life. From ghosts to golems to far future AIs these stories ask the big questions: What is consciousness? What gives a being its soul? What are the boundaries of love? And, perhaps most importantly, how will libraries save us all?

“Imagine this: you go into your local bookstore or library and ask for a book where somewhere in the future and also in the past, China Miéville and Amal El-Mohtar collaborated with Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino to write fiction about the enigmatic,
mysterious, numinous power of books and libraries; of memory, time and stories; of relationships, queerness and words; and also included a golem and some cyborgs. Right, they say, disappearing into a cloud, into rumour and smoke, then hand you The Library Cosmic. This book. It does what you hope a book can do: inspire, surprise, confound, move and explain, sometimes things you didn’t even know you wondered about, sometimes things you always have. It’s beautiful and intriguing. It’s world-expanding.” – Gary Barwin, author of Scandal at the Alphorn Factory and Yiddish for Pirates

  • Ben Berman Ghan is the author of The Years Shall Run Like Rabbits (Buckrider Books 2024), as well as Behold the Dead (Anstruther Press 2025), Visitation Seeds (845 Press 2020) and What We See in the Smoke (Crowsnest Books 2019). His prose, poetry and criticism have previously been published in Clarkesworld Magazine, Strange Horizons, The Ex-Puritan and Ancillary Review of Books, and have been reprinted in such anthologies as Year’s Best Canadian Fantasy and Science Fiction and Year’s Best Science Fiction on Earth. His work has won the Foreword INDIES Silver Medal for Science Fiction, was longlisted for the Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Literature of the Fantastic and has been a semifinalist for the Small Spec Book Award for Science Fiction. He is a grateful recipient of the Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity’s Science Fiction Writers’ Residence and is a PhD Candidate in English and creative writing at the University of Calgary, where he lives with his partner and two cats.

  • The Years Shall Run Like Rabbits (2024)

Titles by this Author

  • The Years Shall Run Like Rabbits