The Disappearing Act
-
- Pre-Order
-
- Expected Feb 17, 2026
-
- $10.99
-
- Pre-Order
-
- $10.99
Publisher Description
From the renowned Russian author of In Memory of Memory, a stunning new dreamlike work about exile and art
The writer M has lived in the city of B ever since her homeland declared war on a neighboring state. Exiled, she is unable to write there and suffers from loneliness, shame, and despair, but then M is invited to give a reading at a literary festival in a nearby country. After a series of missed connections and mishaps, including losing her phone, she finds herself all alone in the wrong coastal town, befriending a local man and attending the circus…
In this brief interlude, severed from reality, it seems as if M may finally escape from herself, from her past, from her nationality. She could start all over from scratch and join the circus. Written in Maria Stepanova’s rich and hypnotic prose, The Disappearing Act oscillates between reality and dream, between an oppressive present and a lost past, between life and literature.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this captivating and capacious novel from Stepanova (In Memory of Memory), a 50-year-old novelist experiences a bizarre and liberating metamorphosis while in exile from her unnamed home country, which has just started a devastating war with its neighbor. On a train to a literary festival in another country, M, a native Russian speaker who hasn't written anything in a while, can't escape the feeling that "her life now boiled down to reading the news and military dispatches," and that there is a beast inside of her barely kept at bay by the "façade of politeness." When her train is abruptly halted due to a rail strike, M finds herself stranded in a small coastal town. With her phone dead, she reads the health warnings on her box of cigarettes and thinks about tarot cards. In a liminal state, she wanders onto a circus ground where the company of sideshow performers have recently lost their magician. M volunteers to save their act by participating in a trick in which she appears to be sawed in half. Seemingly reborn and alive to herself for the first time in years after the performance, M now says her name is A, and she leaves behind her passive former self. Far from a literary gimmick, the novel comes across as an urgent call to resist complacency and recover one's vitality in the face of injustice. It's a stunner.
