Poignant, ironizing its own ironies, as M finds two wrongs--any number of wrongs--never make a right."--Michael Autrey "Booklist"

Dugdale's translation is a loving one, beautifully rendering Stepanova's melodic and rhythmic prose into precise English... With The Disappearing Act, Stepanova's talents have grown to include a magical quality, and it leaves me longing for more of her tricks.--Olga Ziberbourg "On the Seawall"

Existing somewhere between dream and reality, The Disappearing Act is a meditation on exile, identity, and the allure of disappearing completely from one of contemporary Russia's most critical voices.--Linnea Gradin "Electric Lit"

Stepanova's prose work is discursive, expansively imaginative in its musings and digressions. The translation by Dugdale is lucid, vivid and fluid.--Barbara Conaty "Library Journal"

Captivating and capacious... The novel comes across as an urgent call to resist complacency and recover one's vitality in the face of injustice. It's a stunner.-- "Publishers Weekly (starred review)"

The Disappearing Act is a witty, unsettling and profound reflection on belonging and estrangement.--Abdulrazak Gurnah

This is an intimate and profound study of liminality and identity from one of the most important writers of our time.--Pierce Alquist "Book Riot"

An essential book written with deep insight, despair and an intrinsic sense of the alarming recurrence of the present's failure to learn lessons from the past.-- "The Irish Times"

The novel provides a striking articulation of the incongruity in M's anonymity...M does not so much go off the grid as temporarily disappear into it--she finds herself in movement without the structure of departure and arrival.-- "Kismet Magazine"

Expect entrancing prose suffused with wry observations, a little humour and memories of lost worlds--the world lost with the fall of the Soviet Union; the world lost to Vladimir Putin; the world lost to the Ukraine war--more redolent of great poetry than contemporary fiction.-- "Frieze"

Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation

Pub date: 2026-02-17

Length: 144 pages