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Book Cover for: The Disappearing ACT, Maria Stepanova

The Disappearing ACT

Maria Stepanova

The writer M has lived in the city of B ever since her homeland declared war on a neighboring state. Exiled, she is unable to write there and suffers from loneliness, shame, and despair, but then M is invited to give a reading at a literary festival in a nearby country. After a series of missed connections and mishaps, including losing her phone, she finds herself all alone in the wrong coastal town, befriending a local man and attending the circus...

In this brief interlude, severed from reality, it seems as if M may finally escape from herself, from her past, from her nationality. She could start all over from scratch and join the circus. Written in Maria Stepanova's rich and hypnotic prose, The Disappearing Act oscillates between reality and dream, between an oppressive present and a lost past, between life and literature.

Book Details

  • Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
  • Publish Date: Feb 3rd, 2026
  • Pages: 144
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 0.00in - 0.00in - 0.00in - 0.00lb
  • EAN: 9780811239400
  • Categories: World Literature - Russia - 21st CenturyLiteraryPolitical

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About the Author

Stepanova, Maria: -

Poet, novelist, essayist, and journalist, Maria Stepanova is the author of ten poetry collections and three books of essays. Her poetry collections Holy Winter 20/21 and War of the Beasts and the Animals were Poetry Book Society Translation Choices and winners of PEN Translates awards, and War of the Beasts and the Animals was also shortlisted for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation 2021. Her novel In Memory of Memory won Russia's Big Book Award in 2018 and was published in English in Sasha Dugdale's translation. She was awarded the Berman Literature Prize for In Memory of Memory, and was also shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation, and the James Tait Black Prize for Biography.

Maria Stepanova has received several Russian and international literary awards (including the prestigious Andrey Bely Prize and Joseph Brodsky Fellowship). In 2022 she was awarded the Leipzig Book Prize for European Understanding 2023 for a book of poetry, Mädchen ohne Kleider (Girls Without Clothes). She founded and was editor-in-chief of the online independent crowd-sourced journal Colta.ru, which engaged with the cultural, social and political reality of contemporary Russia until the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine when all dissenting media in Russia were forced to shut down. As a prominent critic of Putin's regime, she had to leave Russia and is now living in exile.

Dugdale, Sasha: -

Sasha Dugdale is a poet and translator. Her sixth book of poetry is The Strongbox, published by Carcanet (UK) in 2024. Deformations (2020) was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot and Derek Walcott Prizes. Her long poem "Joy" won the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem of 2016.

Dugdale's translation of Maria Stepanova's prose work In Memory of Memory was shortlisted for the International Booker and won the MLA Lois Roth Award. 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. For many years she specialized in translating Russian-language new writing for theaters in the UK and US, including the New York Public Theater and the UK's Royal Court Theatre and Royal Shakespeare Company.

More books by Maria Stepanova

Book Cover for: Holy Winter 20/21, Maria Stepanova
Book Cover for: In Memory of Memory, Maria Stepanova
Book Cover for: War of the Beasts and the Animals, Maria Stepanova
Book Cover for: The Voice Over: Poems and Essays, Maria Stepanova
Book Cover for: A Beautiful Rose and a Humble Dandelion, Maria Stepanova
Book Cover for: The Beautiful Rose and a Humble Dandelion: A cute story about beauty inside and outside, Oksana Mansberger
Book Cover for: Order Me Some Magic: Fantastic story about fun creature created by accident, Maria Stepanova
Book Cover for: Order me Some Magic, Maria Stepanova
Book Cover for: Friendship not from first sight: Funny book about two dogs, Maria Stepanova
Book Cover for: Friendship Not From First Sight, Maria Stepanova

Praise for this book

Stepanova's companionable prose balances high seriousness with self-ironizing deadpan humour. Without pretension, she erects her house of memory in the neighbourhood of Marcel Proust, Vladimir Nabokov, and Sebald.--Rachel Polonsky "Times Literary Supplement"