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Stories (The Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction)
by Karin Lin-Greenberg
Winner of the Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction, Vanished tells the stories of women and girls in upstate New York who are often overlooked or unseen by the people around them.
The characters range from an aging art professor whose students are uninterested in learning what she has to teach, to a young girl who becomes the victim of a cruel prank in a swimming pool, to a television producer who regrets allowing her coworkers into her mother's bird-filled house to film a show about animal hoarding because it will reveal too much about her family and past.
Humorous and empathetic, the collection exposes the adversity in each character's life; each deals with something or someone who has vanished—a person close to her, a friendship, a relationship—as she seeks to make sense of the world around her in the wake of that loss.
"In Lin-Greenberg's superb collection, dramatic scenes play out between students and teachers...[her] flawless and insightful prose gives an acute sense of the characters' perspectives as they change. This accomplished work is full of surprises." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"A rich tapestry of stories set in upstate New York...Overall, the success of this book is most apparent in the endings. Lin-Greenberg does not wrap up her stories neatly with bows. Instead she shows the reader a more truthful and profound reality...Thoughtful, wry, and bittersweet." - Kirkus Reviews
"In this compassionate, unapologetic, and hilarious collection, Karin Lin-Greenberg's unmistakably unique voice shines. The human struggle for connection guides us through each story's surprising world of art, pop culture, school, difficult relationships, and weird animals. I fell in love with these edgy, lost characters who bump into enlightenment by accident, and only after wading through oceans of denial and terrible choices. Vanished is a celebration of our flawed humanity." - Erika Krouse, author of Tell Me Everything: The Story of a Private Investigation
"The stories in Karin Lin-Greenberg's Vanished do not shy away from our current moment of division and estrangement. Like Richard Yates's Eleven Kinds of Loneliness or Stephanie Vaughn's Sweet Talk, Lin-Greenberg's Vanished is peopled with characters who are bitter and funny and who do questionable things—and who are, as a result, imminently human, unquestioningly alive on the page. An engrossing and extraordinary book by a true master of the form." - Nick White, author of Sweet and Low
This information about Vanished was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Karin Lin-Greenberg is the author of the story collections Faulty Predictions, winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, and Vanished. She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, and her stories have appeared in publications including the Antioch Review, the Southern Review, Story, and the Chicago Tribune. She is also the author of the forthcoming novel You Are Here.
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