When the Los Angeles Times named Kim Samek’s debut story collection one of 20 books to anticipate in 2026, it recommended “I Am the Ghost Here” for fans of Aimee Bender. On Tuesday night, Bender will sit across from Samek at Vroman’s Bookstore to discuss the book herself.
The collection, published last month by The Dial Press, gathers 12 stories about women confronting the mounting absurdities of modern life — limbs vanishing into “the cloud” during power outages, a gymnastics coach carrying her heart in a Mason jar after a pandemic, soulmates learning their connection was engineered by an algorithm. Publishers Weekly gave it a starred review, and Booklist did the same. Five other outlets — Lit Hub, The Millions, The Seattle Times, Debutiful, and Alta — named it a most anticipated book of 2026, according to the publisher.
Samek is not a typical debut fiction writer. A half-Thai, Emmy-nominated television producer whose credits include MTV’s “Catfish” and PBS’s “WordGirl,” she studied creative writing and German literature at Stanford University before spending years in Hollywood. She began writing the stories in 2022, she told Debutiful, and completed the collection in just over a year.
“I wrote these stories to process my own anxieties and to make myself laugh,” Samek said in a BOMB Magazine interview. Her fiction has won a Pushcart Prize and was cited as a Distinguished Story in Best American Short Stories 2025. She is a native of Seattle who lives in Los Angeles.
Bender, a Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California, is the author of six books, including “The Girl in the Flammable Skirt” and “The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake.” She is known for fiction that bends reality in ways that share common ground with Samek’s collection — a kinship noted by the LA Times and by National Book Award winner Charles Yu, who described the stories as offering “possibility, surprise, humor, or heartbreak,” according to a blurb published by the book’s publisher.
The event begins at 7 p.m. Tuesday at Vroman’s Bookstore, 695 E. Colorado Blvd. The hardcover is priced at $28. A purchase of the book from Vroman’s is encouraged by the store but not required to attend. Vroman’s can be reached at (626) 449-5320 or at https://vromansbookstore.com/event/2026-03-17/kim-samek.
Samek’s path from television to fiction was deliberate. “I honed my craft working in television, where I developed the muscle memory to edit quickly and to finish work on a deadline,” she told BOMB Magazine. The stories, she said, were answering a single question about modern life: “How did we get here?”
