Tara Lynn Masih

Tara Lynn Masih is a National Jewish Book Award Finalist and winner of a Julia Ward Howe Award for her novel My Real Name Is Hanna. In addition, the novel was recognized by the Florida Book Awards and the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards with gold medals. Her fiction, poetry, and essays have been published in numerous literary magazines, including Confrontation, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Natural Bridge, The Caribbean Writer, Five Points, The Baltimore Review, and Pleiades. Her work appears in numerous anthologies, including W.W. Norton’s New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction; Flashed: Sudden Stories in Comics and Prose; Manticore: Hybrid Writing from Hybrid Identities; Facing the Change: Personal Encounters with Global Warming; and Two Worlds Walking: Short Stories, Essays, and Poetry by Writers with Mixed Heritages. Additional recognition for her work includes first place in The Ledge Magazine’s fiction contest, a Wigleaf Top 50 Award (judged by Roxane Gay), a grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and the Lou P. Bunce Creative Writing Award. Her fiction and creative nonfiction have received multiple Pushcart Prize nominations. Tara is editor of the acclaimed Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction and founded The Best Small Fictions series in 2015. Much of her writing is set within the framework of nature and place, a result of the years she spent outdoors in the woods and on the shores of Long Island Sound. Never far from water, she now lives on the border of the Twelve Mile Swamp in St. Augustine, Florida. Visit TaraMasih.com

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

Masih’s collection is a beautiful and carefully written work that deftly searches below the surface for the personal feelings of the diverse characters and blends them with the oftentimes stunning outside world. . . . Luminous . . . 

—Kirkus Reviews

What a stunning collection of short stories capturing loss, those who “disappear” in various ways, and hope for the future. In twelve short stories and a novella, Tara Lynn Masih has penned her most exquisite work yet….Highly recommended for fans of immersive, beautiful, lyrical storytelling. I have a short list of favorite short storytellers. Tara Lynn Masih is on that short list.

—Jennifer Clayton, Tar Heel Reader

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

Praise for Where the Dog Star Never Glows

This is a rich and surprising collection. I loved how—whether they are set in Dominica, Montana, Holland, the Mexican Border, New England, India, or the territory of schizophrenia—these stories are all concerned with seeking to find, or to lose—or simply to come to terms with—love and the self. The characters are wildly varied and wonderfully inhabited; the settings are intensely observed and believable.
—Grace Dane Mazur, author of Silk and Trespass

Revitalizing themselves in far-flung corners of the globe, Masih’s characters emerge at crossroads in their lives, groping to discover intimacies situated in the small spaces of vast landscapes. . . . [A] wise and beautifully written collection imbued with a sharp awareness that makes her subtle, emotionally honest portrayals haunting and powerful. It is impressive in its evocative breadth as it is in its intimate depth.
—Michael Hartnett, author of Universal Remote

The characters in Tara Masih’s Where The Dog Star Never Glows are bright and daring, her prose vivid and full of poetry, her landscapes rendered with astonishing beauty. These stories will captivate readers of all stripes—a highly absorbing and original debut.
—Laura van den Berg, author of What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us

Whether on a car ride, Coney Island—in Europe, or Appalachia, the stories in this collection are like eloquent journeys. Where the Dog Star Never Glows illuminates, gracefully, with keenness; with a sharp eye for emotion, and a zoom into the senses, Tara Masih is a talent, and this book is full of heart.
—Kim Chinquee, author of OH BABY and Pretty

Within each of these stories lies a surprise at the turn of the page. Sometimes subtle, sometimes not, but Masih always has a surprise waiting. This is a wonderful debut collection, which travelers should bring along in their backpacks or suitcases and savor in those moments of solitude.
—Jeff Talarigo, author of The Pearl Diver and The Ginseng Hunter

These stories travel the world to explore a terrain more mysterious and fulfilling than place—that of the human mind and heart. The finely crafted prose and acute observations in this collection left an indelible impression on me. Where the Dog Star Never Glows marks the arrival of a gifted new writer.
—Lisa Borders, author of Cloud Cuckoo Land, winner of the Fred Bonnie Memorial Award for Best First Novel

Masih’s stories are minimally but skillfully detailed . . . giving extra weight to simple, recurring phenomena like water and color (‘the evening’s August melon light’). Striking and resonant, this collection should prove memorable.
—Publishers Weekly