Title: The Disappearing Act
Publisher: Fitzcarraldo Editions
Publication Date: 2026
Language: English
ISBN 10: 1804272329
ISBN 13: 9781804272329
Binding: Soft cover
Edition: 1st Edition
Condition: New
Dust Jacket Condition: New
Dimensions: 12.5 centimeters width by 19.71 centimeters height by 0.74 centimeters depth
Weight: 190 grams
Signed: Signed by Author(s)

About this title

Synopsis

The writer known as M. is living in exile while her home country wages war on a neighbouring state. Wracked by shame and severed from her language, M. finds herself unable to write, unmoored in a present where the future feels unknowable. When she travels to a nearby country for an event, a twist of fate leaves her stranded in an unfamiliar city, phoneless and untraceable. In this rupture, she feels a flicker of liberation – the possibility of starting over – but memories of childhood, books, films and tarot cards pull her back, the last fragments of a vanishing world. Then she meets a troupe of circus performers who invite her to join them. For a moment, reinvention seems within reach. Oscillating between reality and dream, written in rich, hypnotic prose, The Disappearing Act is a haunting meditation on identity, language and the fragile desire to disappear by Maria Stepanova, one of Russia’s greatest living writers.

About the Authors

Maria Stepanova is a poet, essayist, journalist and the author of ten poetry collections and three books of essays. In Memory of Memory won Russia’s Bolshaya Kniga Award in 2018. Sasha Dugdale's English translation was awarded the Berman Literature Prize and was also shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation and the James Tait Black Prize for Biography. She founded and was editor-in-chief of the online independent crowd-sourced journal Colta.ru. As a prominent critic of Putin’s regime, she had to leave Russia and is now living in exile.

Sasha Dugdale is a poet and translator. Her sixth book of poetry, The Strongbox, was published by Carcanet in 2024. Dugdale's translation of Maria Stepanova's prose work In Memory of Memory was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize and won the MLA Lois Roth Award, among other accolades. She has translated two of Stepanova's poetry collections and work by a number of Russian-language women poets, including Elena Shvarts and Marina Tsvetaeva.

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