PRAISE FOR HOW WE DISAPPEAR

Emotionally intelligent, lyrically hypnotizing. . . . a wonderful balance of loss and discovery.

—The Main Street Rag

These stories vary from one another in a brilliantly interesting number of ways . . . every disappearance is unique and beautiful. . . . a treat to read.

—Mid-American Review

Every life is full of emotional upheavals, and a landscape of identity and circumstances. In this book, the author weaves one compelling narrative after another until the reader is enthralled by the endless list of historical and contemporary stories about lives that were never really lost. A most engaging read.
—Reader’s Favorite

Tara Lynn Masih’s exceptional short story and novella collection How We Disappear presents a sprawling range of characters, unique voices, and exotic settings [and] showcases the considerable talents of Masih, particularly in creating characters that manage to feel unique and yet familiar at the same time, and settings so full of sensory details they become characters in themselves. This fine collection is a worthy addition to any bookshelf.
—Southern Literary Review

Rarer is the writer who leaves no traces of herself, allowing the characters to wield their own singular voices, yet Masih has achieved it in each of her far-ranging yet intimate stories.
—LitPub

"Engaging, entertaining, original, thought-provoking . . . and unreservedly recommended."
—Midwest Book Review

A virtuoso collection of stories that spin around an axis of loss and rediscovery, where things thought gone forever magically reappear in new guises. Tara Lynn Masih has created a world of stolen girls, magic livestock, ghost towns, enchanted confections, and forbidden love that is underpinned in equal measure by wry humor and peril. These are middle-of-the night stories, secret messages carried on desert winds, spider-web invitations that make you want to stay and dream some more.
—Tina May Hall, author of The Snow Collectors and winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize

How We Disappear traffics, beautifully, in the liminal spaces between past and present, imagination and memory. These stories are concise, unsparing, lyrical, always daring.
—Michael Parker, O. Henry Award–winning author of Prairie Fever

It is easy to love a ghost who asks nothing of you,” writes Tara Lynn Masih, in her lush, lyrical and richly imagined collection How We Disappear. With sweeping intelligence and effortless command, Masih deftly explores the aching presence of the absent, and the absence of those present, in stories that read like instant classics—timely, and yet, of another time. Of a transient surfer lover in Puerto Rico: “He can even walk across the board as it skims the water that curls under him, like shavings of butter or chocolate.” These are sensual, transporting stories that traverse the globe, asking questions like, “Would she ever look like she belonged to the landscape, or was her background meant to be ever changing, ever turning?” as they burrow deep and stay within long after we finish reading.
—Sara Lippmann, author of Jerks and Doll Palace, Longlisted for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award

The breadth and diversity of the stories in How We Disappear illustrate the vast possibilities of human experience. A multiplicity of voices, backgrounds, regions, story lengths, points-of-view, levels of realism, and historical contexts show the extraordinary range of Masih’s vision. The characters who populate the collection are driven by impulses stronger than their own understandings, and it is often by following those impulses that they find their salvation. The result is a book that explores with insight the role of instinct in human life. How We Disappear reveals the strange animals that we are, and the wondrous beings our minds make of us.
—Phong Nguyen, author of The Bronze Drum and Pages from the Textbook of Alternate History

In How We Disappear, Masih's characters move out of, into, and through vivid, beautifully rendered landscapes—of the world and of the self. Disappearing acts are urgent and necessary, leading to a deeply interior sense of redemption and connection. A powerful collection.
—Claire Boyles, author of Site Fidelity, Longlisted for the PEN/America Robert W. Bingham Prize

How We Disappear is stunning and startling, splendid and spectral, in so many ways. Tara Lynn Masih has offered us a mesmerizing collection.
—Stacy D. Flood, author of The Salt Fields: A Novella, Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards Finalist

The ink is never pale in How We Disappear, and neither are the memories. With each story, I became more and more amazed. Masih is a frotteur in the old sense, rubbing words together to make distant worlds surface and come alive in rich, lush, and engrossing detail. As a writer, I always learn more about writing from Tara Lynn Masih. As a reader, I'm always carried away by her stories.
—Grant Faulkner, author of Fissures and The Art of Brevity