Excuse Me While I Disappear: Stories (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780316498746)

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.

Author: Joanna Scott
ISBN-10: 0316498742
ISBN-13: 9780316498746
Publisher: Little Brown and Company
Language: English
Published: 04/20/2021
Pages: 224
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 0.75lbs
Size: 8.40h x 5.80w x 1.00d

Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 02/22/2021
Booklist 04/01/2021 pg. 17
Library Journal 03/26/2021 pg. 1
Kirkus Reviews 04/15/2021