Excuse Me While I Disappear, Joanna Scott
Excuse Me While I Disappear, Joanna Scott
List: $18.99 | Sale: $13.29
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Excuse Me While I Disappear
Stories

Author: Joanna Scott

Narrator: Christine Lakin, Tracey Leigh, Katy Yang, Jim Meskimen

Unabridged: 5 hr 48 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 04/20/2021


Synopsis

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.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Rachel on April 26, 2021

A collection of stories about how we tell stories, ranging from cave drawings to a future where writing on paper is illegal. The events in each short are often recounted second-hand, or years after it originally took place; they aren't concerned with the truth (can a baby disappear and reappear with......more

Goodreads review by Rick on August 15, 2021

This peaked with its third story, "The Knowledge Gallery," and I contemplated four stars early on. I will sample more Joanna Scott.......more

Goodreads review by Mark on June 25, 2021

I picked up this book from the “New Fiction” section at the library, having never heard of the author. I thought I would give it a shot because the book was short, and I love short stories. Scott did not disappoint. Her style differs from most of the writers I read as it’s broader in scope (some sto......more

Goodreads review by 지훈 on July 22, 2021

Although I enjoyed reading this book, I wasn't especially moved by any one story or component. Maybe I set too high of an expectation based on the title (which I absolutely adore), or I was expecting a different type of short story collection, but I thought that the pieces themselves, while very wel......more

Goodreads review by Deena on January 10, 2023

Short stories covering time periods from the ancient past to near future, where words were discovered and where words disappeared, fill this volume. The through line of these tales is one of storytelling through writing and art, which gives it a meta feel, especially since the author slips what the......more