How We Disappear: Novella and Stories by Tara Lynn Masih - #BookReview #BlogTour

 

It's my job to bring ghosts back to life, to make them resurface and reform out of amorphous images and subconscious memories. To do this, I stare all day at closed circuit TV monitors, grainy footage from grimy cameras hung in corners that capture our worst moments. Or the deceptively mundane - a final purchase, a walk down a dark street, a bicycle flying past.

You see, I passed the many tests given by the police department so they can ferret out the super recognizers in our city... I was able to match up, on my computer screen, the array of faces to each other, to pick them out of lineups and mug shots and to match them to their CCTV scans...Out of 500 faces... I got just one wrong.

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In How We Disappear, Masih offers readers transporting and compelling stories of those taken, those missing, and those neither here nor gone—runaways, exiles, wanderers, ghosts, even the elusive Dame Agatha Christie. From the remote Siberian taiga to the harsh American frontier, from rural Long Island to postwar Belgium, Masih’s characters are diverse in identity and circumstance, defying the burden of erasure by disappearing into or emerging from physical and emotional landscapes.

Described as “masterful” and as “striking and resonant” (Publishers Weekly), Masih’s fiction, crossing boundaries between historical and contemporary, sparks with awareness that nothing and no one is ever gone for good—and that the wilderness is never quite behind us.

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I have long been a fan of Ms. Masih's writing and she has been on the blog on a few occasions. I adored her book, My Real Name is Hanna, and you can read my review by clicking here. She has also been on the blog in one of my Desert Island Books slots, which you can find here. She also appeared as a guest which you can read here.

This is a skilful collection of short stories, all focusing on the theme of loss. My particular favourite was Agatha: A Life in Unauthorised Fragments. It tells of the disappearance of Agatha Christie, and the author writes of those eleven days in which the famous Mrs. Christie was missing eloquently and engagingly. Even though it is a subject matter that I am already familiar with, it was a pleasure to re-familiarise myself with it through the pen of Ms. Masih.

As a collection of twelve short stories and a novella, and with each taking a different look at the theme of disappearance and loss, they hang securely together as a whole, with each passing seamlessly to the next.

It does not surprise me that the author has written this lovely collection of stories. She is an excellent storyteller and writes with intelligence, flair and sensitivity. I highly recommend this book.

ISBN: 978 1950413454

Publisher: Press 53

Formats: e-book, audio, hardback and paperback.

No. of Pages: 164 

About the Author:

Tara Lynn Masih is a National Jewish Book Award Finalist and winner of the Julia Ward Howe Award for Young Readers for her debut novel My Real Name Is Hanna. Her anthologies include The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction and The Chalk Circle: Intercultural Prizewinning Essays. How We Disappear: Novella & Stories is her latest collection of long and very short stories, and she’s published multiple chapbooks with the Feral Press that are archived in universities such as Yale and NYU. She founded the Intercultural Essay Prize in 2006 and The Best Small Fictions series in 2015.

Masih received a finalist fiction grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, an Inspirational Woman in Literature Award from AITL Media, and several national book awards including an IBPA Benjamin Franklin Award for her role as an editor.

(ARC courtesy of the author and NetGalley)