The stories in Ways to Disappear beautifully articulate the anxieties and aspirations of contemporary life. Victoria Lancelotta’s prose is lyrical, intuitive, and expansive. She opens up the small space of a story and breathes life into unexplored corners. She captures the prickling, quick fire actions that kindle in adolescence, but her antenna is good, too, when it comes to reporting on the more cautious, more subterranean passions and difficulties of adult life. “You are Here” is an astonishing story and the rest of the collection doesn’t disappoint.” —Kelly Link "Lancelotta has her finger on the pulse of how life consumes us, from moments large to small. A compulsively readable and emotionally affecting book." —Electric Literature
"Let's say they're organizing a race. Let's say word reaches me Lancelotta's among the runners. What I do is lay my bet on Lancelotta. Heaven help us, there is a race. When is there not a race? This is how the world is organized—run, run, run. Is there any having a world wrought otherwise? So be it. My money's well wagered. Lancelotta, Lancelotta, Lancelotta!" —Gordon Lish
“Victoria Lancelotta’s new book, Ways to Disappear, is a tour de force of short fiction, it’s as tough and broad and wide ranging as a killer novel, as rich line-for-line as the finest poem, and it is mean. It spares not the author, the characters, the relationships, the siblings, the husbands and wives. There is a richness here that is rarely found in contemporary fiction. From the opening piece to the closing the work is touching and masterful, gritty, sharp-edged, unsparing. It’s not a tea party. What it is is consistently heartbreaking and true, a world alive, characters that see, feel, experience the full measure of unfiltered emotions, heartbreak, longing, caring, hoping, wishing, waiting. Ways to Disappear is a sublime collection, astonishing, thrilling, hard as nails, bright as ice.” —Frederick Barthelme
★ 2023-08-03
Lancelotta chronicles life’s dissatisfactions in this short fiction collection.
A pregnant teen and her boyfriend hit the road with a bag of stolen cash to build a life for themselves and their imminent child, unaware of how migratory and lonely that life will be for all three of them. A married mother with a teenage daughter gets caught up in the memories of her own youth, particularly of her brother’s terminal disease and the peculiar pressures it put on her and her friends. A woman caring for her rapidly declining husband can’t help but resent her parents, wealthy octogenarians in perfect health. A baker reflects on her relationship with a much older man who remains devastated by the maiming of his piano-playing son. In these 15 stories, the author explores the many ways that life can go off course, whether from small miscalculations made long ago or small acts of cruelty committed in the present. “Those birthdays,” rues one narrator, caught up in the cycling years of her life; “by the thirty-fifth the slide had started, merrily relentless; the march and tick of indifference even though my hair was still shiny my legs still long my mouth still warm and wet” (“A Little Mercy”). Lancelotta's sentences read like poetry, as here in the opener about the pregnant teenage couple: “The traffic light at the intersection flashes yellow and the spindly pines stab black at the resting sky and where they are is the beating heart of everything waiting for them. They believe this. They are too young not to” (“You Are Here”). These stories masterfully evoke life’s inevitable slippage, the way a personal history is composed of moments that either burn brightly in one’s memory or disappear entirely. Standout pieces include “The Anniversary Trip” and “Ambivalence,” but every story here deserves to be read slowly and carefully, with time allotted to recover in between.
A dazzling collection of stories covering rough emotional terrain.
