Excuse Me While I Disappear
Stories
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
From a Pulitzer Prize finalist and "greatly gifted and highly original artist" comes a masterful collection of stories about the timeless universal struggle to connect (New York Times).
Joanna Scott, the critically acclaimed author of ten novels and two collections, turns her “incandescent imagination” (Publishers Weekly) back to the craft of the short story, with breathtaking results. Ranging across history from the distant past to the future, Scott tours the many forms our stories can take, from cave wall paintings to radio banter to digitized archives, and the far-reaching consequences of our communications.
In Venice in the Late Middle Ages, a painter's apprentice finds a way to make his mark on canvases that will survive for centuries. In the near future, after the literary canon has been preserved only on the cloud and then lost, a scholar tries to piece together a little-known school of writers committed to using actual paper. In present day New England, a radio host invites his electrician to stay for dinner, opening up new narrative possibilities for both men.
Written in prose so naturally elegant, smooth, and precise that it becomes invisible, Excuse Me While I Disappear asks what remains of our stories—as individuals and civilizations—after we are gone.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Scott (Careers for Women) returns to short fiction with a vibrant collection that explores human desire and vulnerability in a staggering range of circumstances, often built on contrasts and comparisons between the present and ancient history. After a man is rescued from a snowbound encampment in "The Limestone Book," he expresses curiosity about Disney World and Facebook and shares a rich, if cryptic, history involving cave drawings that would become the undoing of his home village. In the cinematic "Dreaming of Fire," Scott imagines the life of restless Francesco Colonna, who becomes a monk and firebrand in 15th-century Venice. Scott also travels to the future, where a scholar in a paperless society scrambles to resurrect the work of the Avantis, an early 20th-century literary movement, after an entire library vanishes from the cloud. The title story is the standout, featuring an electrician on a job site who finds his personal life becoming so mired in the nosy homeowner's "thick web of presumption" about him that he indulges in a series of grandiose fabrications, which eventually lead to his humiliation. Stories vary in length from novella to sketch, and each is animated by polished prose and engrossing setups. The delightfully addictive stories entertain, but they also reveal the beauty and the bedevilment of the human condition.
