EXCUSE ME WHILE I DISAPPEAR

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.