WAYS TO DISAPPEAR (Victoria Lancelotta)

“[A] wondrous book….the shimmering stories included in Ways to Disappear remind us that experience remains, relentlessly and materially, embedded within ourselves, and without.”

—Cristina Rivera Garza, author of The Iliac Crest and The Taiga Syndrome

WAYS TO DISAPPEAR

A Collection of Short Stories
by Victoria Lancelotta

FC2 | August 2023
$18.95 | 262 Pages | Paperback
ISBN: 978-1-573662-01-7

Winner of the 2022 Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize, as selected by Cristina Rivera Garza, Victoria Lancelotta’s collection WAYS TO DISAPPEAR channels the best of Mary Gaitskill and Amy Hempel, excavating the unexamined places between dread and desire, promise and threat, where the body is both prison and salvation.

Lancelotta’s characters—withdrawn teenagers, vulnerable brothers and sisters, stray husbands, fearful mothers, girls who barely have a chance to be anything at all—are driven by the irresistible need to be a bigger part of the worlds they inhabit. From dimly lit motel rooms to 24-hour supermarkets, WAYS TO DISAPPEAR illuminates the exhaustion and enchantment of the quotidian, with language lush and jagged, never sentimental.

Featuring a powerful narrative voice, WAYS TO DISAPPEAR brilliantly showcases Lancelotta’s short fiction, which has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories and The Pushcart Prize. Through vivid depictions of the broken, yet beautiful, Lancelotta understands that sometimes people check their wounds not to see if they’ve healed, but to be sure they’re still there.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

VICTORIA LANCELOTTA is author of Here in the World: 13 Stories, and the novels Far and Coeurs Blesses. She is the recipient of a Tennessee Individual Artist Fellowship, multiple Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Grants, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. She lives in Frederick MD.