“The stories in Ghost Tracks are indeed haunted, but not by poltergeists or any other supernatural monsters. Instead, these beautifully-rendered works of short fiction are haunted by memory and missed opportunities. Mark Saba excavates a city of Pittsburgh where the factories are still producing steel and the men still have to speak in shards of blunt metallic language, where shades of meaning hover like ghosts between the words.”
~ Craig Fishbane, On the Proper Role of Desire
Ghost Tracks: Stories of Pittsburgh Past
“In Ghost Tracks: Stories of Pittsburgh Past, Mark Saba writes about a Pittsburgh that is neither material, nor historical, but a place of memory. Beginning his collection with a quote from Tolstoy, ‘Everything is, everything exists, only because I love’ he sketches in ‘the everything’ with stories about professors, workmen, children and nuns told in an amazing range of voices. Some of the narrators relate events as they are occurring and some talk about what happened after their deaths. In the last story in the book, a father who had died when his son was three wonders what his son would have been like if had been a part of his growing up. The father says that the only consolation he can find is that his son uses ‘his uncommon perspective to bring light to others who may have found themselves in the same circumstance.’ Mark Saba has an uncommon perspective, and he has used it to connect us to characters that exist for us because of his expert telling of their stories.”
- Chris Bullard, Fear
“Mark Saba’s Ghost Tracks: Stories of Pittsburgh Past serves up twenty-three delightful vignettes arranged in three movements, chronicling the bittersweet lives of men, women, and children of Pittsburgh past. Among them: a chronic illness, seen and experienced by an innocent child (‘Asthma’); a Lithuanian immigrant girl’s coming of age (‘National Biscuit Company’); and a richly-lived (and told) life viewed through the diary of a blind maid, mother, and crone (‘Eva’). In these and other poignant tales, Saba narrates the human condition at its most savory and delicious.” - Phillip E. Temples, Machine Feelings and Helltown Chronicles