Books
Ways to Disappear
The stories in Victoria Lancelotta’s Ways to Disappear excavate the unexamined places between dread and desire, promise and threat, where the body is both prison and salvation. Populated by the grieving and the exultant and those who see no difference between the two, by men and women who are only a little bit broken and boys and girls who can’t wait to be, by souls untethered, rootless, yet bound by blood and flesh, Lancelotta’s characters are driven by the irresistible need to be a bigger part of the worlds they each inhabit, by turns strange and commonplace. In language lush and jagged, never sentimental, these stories scrutinize the exhaustion and enchantment of the everyday: houses seething with resentment and devotion, cars dream-full and hurtling the children in them into a world they think they know but can’t imagine; front porches, back yards, luxury hotels, and truck stops. Lancelotta understands that sometimes people check their wounds not to see if they’ve healed, but to be sure they’re still there.
Far
A dark, unsettling novel about a woman whose reluctance to adopt traditional female roles of marriage and motherhood results in a painful alienation from her Italian-American family and community.
Here in the World
A debut anthology of short fiction captures the lives of a group of women as they grapple with the complex mysteries of sex, intimacy, adulthood, love, family, faith, and reality. The women in Victoria Lancelotta’s debut collection of stories live in the space between memory and desire, where what they see around them and what they know to be true can be vastly different things. They live in a world where time is malleable, stones are food, the body is an altar, the confessional is a difficult paradise; and the family is the last place to look for home. Edgy, brilliant, and disturbing, Here in the World presents us with short stories about women who, however flawed or compromised, are fierce and unforgettable.