From the Publisher
"A greatly gifted and highly original artist...purely and simply wonderful."— The New York Times Book Review
"Scott's prose is sensitive and beautifully crafted. She writes with subtlety, compassion and humor, and her characters are both eminently human and touched with magic and mystery."—The Washington Post
"The wit, the magical prose and the daring devices of Scott's writing create an enchantment."—The Nation
"A fearlessly intelligent writer."—Louise Erdrich
“[Scott] approaches these lyrical stories with a gemlike precision and economy of language that imbue them with a shimmering quality. Her detailed approach to worldbuilding suggests that embedded messages and meanings can be found in almost anything—perhaps especially in those things we tend to overlook…These details and the mysteries behind them invigorate this collection as much as the eccentric characters embody the narratives…Like a good museum, the collection also entices the reader to look again, both at the stories themselves and the world beyond these pages…A beautiful gallery of meditations on language, mortality, and the attempt to leave a lasting mark on the world.”
—KIRKUS
"Joanna Scott is a writer to treasure."—Peter Ho Davies, author of The Welsh Girl
"Joanna Scott is a magician, a conjurer, one of the very best writers at work today."—Bradford Morrow, author of The Diviner's Tale
"One of our wisest, deftest, most knowing prose stylists."—Jaimy Gordon, author of Lord of Misrule
"Joanna Scott's writing is always a wonder."—Andrea Barrett, author of Archangel and Ship Fever
"Joanna Scott is among the handful of American writers I will always want to read."—Jay Parini, author of The Last Station
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2021-03-31
This dreamy, museumlike collection of stories transports readers from a 15th-century Venetian artist’s workshop to a disappearing literary archive in the year 2052.
Scott, the author of 12 books and a Pulitzer Prize finalist for The Manikin (1996), approaches these lyrical stories with a gemlike precision and economy of language that imbue them with a shimmering quality. Her detailed approach to worldbuilding suggests that embedded messages and meanings can be found in almost anything—perhaps especially in those things we tend to overlook: a tiny teardrop on the portrait of a lady hanging in the Cloisters or the violet, half-blooming capsules of a larkspur. These details and the mysteries behind them invigorate this collection as much as the eccentric characters embody the narratives. Each of the 15 stories has a distinctly different form, ranging from a graduate student’s first-person account of her research on an obscure literary movement to a fast-paced mystery about a child missing on the New York City Subway that unfolds through a series of fragmented accounts. The stories cohere, though, through their overlapping concerns with the function of art in the world and attempts to capture the record of human experience. Like a good museum, the collection also entices the reader to look again, both at the stories themselves and the world beyond these pages. What might we have overlooked? And what if that missing detail is the key to understanding the mysteries that surround us? As one character comments, “We can’t begin to know what we’ve lost. All we can do is keep searching.”
A beautiful gallery of meditations on language, mortality, and the attempt to leave a lasting mark on the world.
