I received an ARC of this book from Netgalley in exchange for my honest review.

REVIEW TO FOLLOW.

You're going to think about Alice Munro a lot.

Every short story in THE DISAPPEARED is exquisitely crafted, of course, but the real power of this collection is how the author delivers a gut punch using only the most sparsely described characters and settings and events, pushing the form of the short story to deliver the most using the least. It's almost as if Andrew Porter uses absence as a texture or a color. If he were a painter, I would call him an expert in using negative space.

As you can imagine, this form fits the theme of "disappearance" extremely well. There are many kinds of disappearances in this book: people disappear, of course, but so does time, paradises, hells, and mostly, the people we used to be. How do you describe the feeling or state of something that doesn't exist anymore, the absence something leaves behind, an absence that fills a whole life?

A genuine pleasure to read.

A new all-time favorite story collection. Porter is a master of the form. Here, he looks at loss and family and each story has stayed with me since finishing, rare for a collection! My interview with Porter is forthcoming on my literary fiction podcast, Reading the Room.

An introspective, cathartic book of poetry that challenges the reader to examine their life in the minutia. I loved this.