“Diski’s wonderful story collection, The Vanishing Princess, holds riches for all. Longtime fans will celebrate the very fact of more Diski and thrill to familiar preoccupations in new settings and shapes. Those who know only the self-elegizing Diski will encounter the expansive parameters of her imagination and intellect. Those who read Diski for the first time are in for the delight of discovery … The three fairy tales that anchor the book speak both to Diski’s timelessness and to her contemporary feminist perspicuity … The book’s other stories begin in the cold reality of women’s daily lives…What makes these stories quintessentially Diski is the way they balance between the sometimes mundane, sometimes grim, sometimes arresting detail of those lives and the spiraling thoughts of the characters who inhabit them. In so doing, they not infrequently stretch the boundaries of realism .. In all her writing, Diski turned her sharply observant gaze on the stuff of the world—people, places, books, things, oncologist appointments—and then thought hard not only about that stuff, but about the thoughts generated by that stuff and the thoughts further generated by those thoughts. In The Vanishing Princess, her characters are to a degree her avatars, sometimes in their reenactments of scenes and themes detailed elsewhere in memoirs and essays, always in the trenchant thinking that makes their stories—and hers—memorable.”
–Rebecca Steinitz, The Boston Globe, December 22, 2017
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