Vanished Stories

In Lin-Greenberg's superb collection (after Faulty Predictions), dramatic scenes play out between students and teachers. Alice, a veteran college art teacher, wearily ferries her stuffed birds to the students' studio for a drawing exercise. There, Alice notices the popular, younger art teacher gathering Alice's own students for a different project when they should be drawing the birds, and Alice responds unexpectedly. In "Roland Raccoon," an elderly middle school teacher keeps a blind and nearly deaf raccoon named Roland as a pet and brings him in for show and tell. In "Lost or Damaged," the narrator, a high school student, follows the lead of her controlling best friend, Arielle. They observe a boy's act of kindness toward new student Olga, and jealousy prompts Arielle to smear Olga's reputation after she is made first chair in the orchestra instead of Arielle. The narrator is torn--she knows Olga suffers from Arielle's insults, but feels tethered to her friend--up to a point. Lin-Greenberg's flawless and insightful prose gives an acute sense of the characters' perspectives as they change. This accomplished work is full of surprises. (Sept.)

A rich tapestry of stories set in upstate New York. The stories here are seemingly unrelated except for their geography. But the shared themes of regret, dissatisfaction, loneliness, and connection make this collection feel interwoven and purposeful. Some stories are more successful than others, and the poignancy of "Migration," "Lost or Damaged," and the titular "Vanished" make the stumbles (such as the unsatisfying "Since Vincent Left") more noticeable. That said, in bite-sized tales, Lin-Greenberg mostly gives us multidimensional characters. In "Roland Raccoon," there's a teacher who can't distance herself from her adolescent mean-girl experiences; "Vanished" features a college student who won't bring herself to welcome her roommate but later clings to the first words that roommate wrote her when the pandemic (and a murder they witnessed) separated them; and in "Migration," a hoarding woman who is just attached enough to reality dismisses the thought that her estranged daughter might be visiting the family to ask for an organ donation: "She wouldn't want a part of any of them floating around inside her body." Overall, the success of this book is most apparent in the endings. Lin-Greenberg does not wrap up her stories neatly with bows. Instead she shows the reader a more truthful and profound reality: characters who don't get the chance to redeem themselves and stories that leave more questions unanswered than not: "Now, when I look back on my early years, it's not what I did that I regret, but rather how much I did not do." Thoughtful, wry, and bittersweet. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Still Life Today Alice's students will draw the pheasants. Alice unlocks the props closet in Bantam Hall on the downtown campus and sees the two taxidermied pheasants on a high shelf, exactly where she left them last semester. The pheasants were purchased by the Department of Art thirty-seven years ago, Alice's first year teaching at Juniper College. She places her tote bag on the floor and opens the brown stepladder in front of the metal shelf with the pheasants on top. She will ask the girls in her 10:00 a.m. Intermediate Drawing class to render the pheasants in pastel, but she knows the drawings will turn out poorly because these girls insist on buying the absolute cheapest supplies, garbage with too much filler and hardly any pigment. Bad supplies make bad art. Last week she overheard a student boasting about paying only two dollars for a box of pastels at Walmart. It is incomprehensible that these students think Walmart is an acceptable place to buy art supplies. One goes to Walmart to buy toothpaste and bug spray and cereal and kitty litter, not to buy the supplies with which you create art. But the girls in her classes don't actually aspire to be real artists; Alice knows they think her class is just a requirement to suffer through so they can get their degrees and get jobs. "Oh, ma'am, ma'am, let me," calls a voice, and Alice turns and sees a boy with a wispy, struggling goatee rushing toward her. "I'm perfectly capable," Alice says, and she puts one foot on the bottom step of the stepladder. Why is he calling her "ma'am"? Isn't it obvious she's a professor and owns a key to the closet? The boy looks at her as if she's an old vagrant who snuck into the building to pilfer supplies but, really, who would want to steal driftwood or cow skulls or cloth flowers? These items might be useful in a still life but not in real life. "I'd better do it," says the boy as he walks toward her. "I'm Hutch. I'm the keeper of the props closet." "The keeper of the props closet?" Alice cannot keep the incredulity out of her voice. Is he being paid to guard a locked closet containing objects of little to no monetary value? The closet is a large space--about half the size of a classroom--but it houses nothing any thief would want. "It's my campus job," Hutch says, and Alice thinks this boy actually looks proud of himself. But it's not a necessary job, at least when professors in the department take the time to instruct their students about respecting the objects that inhabit the closet. But a quick glance at the mess here--the tablecloths bunched up in a corner, the upended armless mannequin, the brass tea kettle dented all over--tells Alice no one has talked to students about carefully putting things back in their proper spots after a still life has been disassembled. "I didn't realize there was such a job," Alice says. She is uncomfortable now, with one foot still propped on the step, so she brings the other foot up. "Oh, no, no, ma'am, I'll do it. I don't want you to hurt yourself." The boy has the nerve to reach out and touch her elbow, trying to guide her down the step as if she is a feeble blind person. Alice swats away his hand. "Do you know how many years I've been fetching these birds from this shelf? And the other birds too?" Alice asks, sweeping her hand toward the Canada goose, and the pileated woodpecker mounted to a tree stump, and the crow with the cracked beak, and the sleepy looking mallard. Excerpted from Vanished: Stories by Karin Lin-Greenberg All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.