Book Club! Brittany's pick: The Disappearing Act by Maria Stepanova

It's the powerful forces of White Whale staff picks and a community book club combined: the Pod Picks Book Club! Each month (usually on the last Thursday), a different bookseller gets to pick a book for the club to read, and they'll host the meeting, too. Book club picks will be 10% off 30 days in advance of the meeting day, to give you time to read it. And plan on grabbing a drink and a snack from the café when you come to the meeting!

Brittany's Pod Pick: The Disappearing Act by Maria Stepanova

"Sometimes, facing the state of the world and the weight of life, we feel the desire to escape—to disappear, even. I'm excited to read and talk about Maria Stepanova’s book, The Disappearing Act, for our June book club, because the book’s protagonist confronts that very possibility. Serendipitously untethered from her war-mongering home country and her milquetoast professional obligations, the main character M. helps us to ask: could an escape hatch ever really open? And if it did, what would happen if I tried to use it? I'm struck by the prose, the simplicity, and the punch in this fiercely controlled novel. I hope you will be, too." - Brittany

BRITTANY BORGHI is a 2022 Fulbright fellow to Italy and a 2018 graduate of the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa. Her work has appeared in The Iowa Review, The Hopkins Review, Guesthouse, Entropy, the Pittsburgh City Paper, and is forthcoming in Fourth River. She grew up in Zelienople, and now she teaches English here in Pittsburgh. She'll make you a cappuccino any time of day.

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The Disappearing Act by Maria Stepanova translated by Sasha Dugdale

The writer M has lived in the city of B ever since her homeland declared war on a neighboring state. While in exile, she is unable to write and suffers from loneliness, shame, and despair. But then M is invited to give a reading at a literary festival in a nearby country, and after a series of missed connections and mishaps, including losing her phone, she finds herself all alone in the wrong coastal town. She feels a flicker of liberation—the possibility of starting over—but memories of childhood, books, films and tarot cards pull her back, the last fragments of a vanishing world. Then she meets a troupe of circus performers who invite her to join them …

In this brief interlude, severed from reality, it seems as if M may finally escape from herself, from her past, from her nationality. Written in rich and hypnotic prose, The Disappearing Act oscillates between reality and dream, between an oppressive present and a lost past, between life and literature.

Praise for The Disappearing Act

"The success of The Disappearing Act lies in how diverting scenes inform larger questions about what makes us who we are when we’re without possessions and places and work, or how we categorize people in the absence of other identifiers, through nationality, for example... The greatest switchback is how it shows that if Stepanova, like her avatar M, is now a novelist in name only, she can nonetheless still do the job very well indeed." — John Self, The New York Times

"Captivating and capacious... 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." — Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"This autofictional blend of memory and fable tracks a changing sense of self... echoes of poetry, skillfully conveyed by translator Sasha Dugdale." — Anna Aslanyan, The Guardian

"Expect entrancing prose suffused with wry observations, a little humour and memories of lost worlds—the world lost with the fall of the Soviet Union; the world lost to Vladimir Putin; the world lost to the Ukraine war—more redolent of great poetry than contemporary fiction." — Marko Gluhaich, Frieze

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