The Library Cosmic: Stories
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?
The Years Shall Run Like Rabbits
A gorgeously complex work of literary speculative fiction that spans centuries The Years Shall Run Like Rabbits starts in 2014 with a winged alien sowing the seeds of a strange forest on the moon. The novel then moves through humanity’s colonization of the moon and its consequences, onto a war with alien beings within a space-going whale, a cyborg mind that sleeps for hundreds of years after sheltering the city of Toronto from the worst of the war and finally a re-creation of humanity. Ghan poses thoughtful questions about artificial intelligence, humanities quest for the stars and ecological destruction in this wide-ranging story, which is held together equally by beautiful writing and deft characterization. The end result is an ambitious debut that leaves the reader contemplating many amazing possibilities for the future of our world.
Silver Medal Winner for the 2024 Foreword INDIES Award for Science Fiction
Longlisted for the 2025 Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Literature of the Fantastic
Semifinalist for the 2025 Small Spec Book Awards in Science Fiction
“Expansive, imaginative and thrumming with volatile life, The Year Shall Run Like Rabbits is a showcase for Ghan’s immersive and elegant prose to depict worlds beyond our own. Toronto will never be the same.”
Andrew F. Sullivan,
author of The Marigold
“Sentient holograms, cyborgs, moon colonies, a dreary future-Toronto – Ghan’s The Years Shall Run Like Rabbits reads like a mythical, cyberpunk, posthuman fever dream. This novel is for fans of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, Larissa Lai’s The Tiger Flu and Omar El Akkad’s American War.”
John Elizabeth Stintzi, author of My Volcano and Bad Houses
“Cinematic, poetic and overflowing with invention, The Years Shall Run Like Rabbits is a marvel – a heartfelt exploration of what it means to be alive, and a love story eons and galaxies in scale. I am in awe of Ben Ghan’s imagination.”
Kim Fu, author of Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century
Praise for Rabbits
“Where Ghan could wallow in misery or doom, he deftly injects compassion, a grace, that flows throughout the novel.”
Samantha Purchase,
Freefall Magazine
“I’ve found myself returning to it again and again, flipping through the pages in search of new details, rereading passages that once mystified me. It is a novel that rewards a second read with a much deeper appreciation of its complexity.”
Libby O’Neil, Full Stop
“Shot through with love stories, anger at authoritarian cruelty, and surreal and striking visions, it’s an elegiac and ruminative novel – a strange but moving meditation on death and change and what comes after.”
Jake Casella Brookins, Locus
“This book reads like a technicolour acid trip, confusion and chaos in the best way, difficulty finding your footing, excited to see what is next. It also has incredibly poetic prose and big, imaginative ideas and could be called a genre-defying piece of work, horror and sci-fi, literary, and dystopian. This is a great read for anyone who finds themselves constantly asking, “where is this world going?” and feeling worried about it.”
Laurie Burns, Miramichi Reader
About Me
I am the author of novel The Years Shall Run Like Rabbits (Buckrider Books 2024), the collection What We See in the Smoke (Crowsnest Books 2019), the novella Visitation Seeds (845 Press 2020), and the poetry chapbook Behold The Dead (Anstruther Press 2025). My work has appeared in such venues as Clarkesworld Magazine, Strange Horizons, The Ex-Puritan, The Ancillary Review of Books, and has been reprinted in such anthologies as Years Best Canadian Fantasy and Science Fiction, and Years Best Science Fiction on Earth. I have served as an editor on served as an editor for Wrong Publishing, Terse Journal, The White Wall Review, and was the editor of Bruce Meyer: Essays on his Works (Guernica Editions 2025). Originally from Toronto, I am a PhD Candidate in English and Creative Writing at the University of Calgary, where I live with my partner and my two cats.
Ben Berman Ghan 