Excuse Me While I Disappear: Stories

Scott (Careers for Women) returns to short fiction with a vibrant collection that explores human desire and vulnerability in a staggering range of circumstances, often built on contrasts and comparisons between the present and ancient history. After a man is rescued from a snowbound encampment in “The Limestone Book,” he expresses curiosity about Disney World and Facebook and shares a rich, if cryptic, history involving cave drawings that would become the undoing of his home village. In the cinematic “Dreaming of Fire,” Scott imagines the life of restless Francesco Colonna, who becomes a monk and firebrand in 15th-century Venice. Scott also travels to the future, where a scholar in a paperless society scrambles to resurrect the work of the Avantis, an early 20th-century literary movement, after an entire library vanishes from the cloud. The title story is the standout, featuring an electrician on a job site who finds his personal life becoming so mired in the nosy homeowner’s “thick web of presumption” about him that he indulges in a series of grandiose fabrications, which eventually lead to his humiliation. Stories vary in length from novella to sketch, and each is animated by polished prose and engrossing setups. The delightfully addictive stories entertain, but they also reveal the beauty and the bedevilment of the human condition. (Apr.)