Those Who Vanish

Patricia Grace King grew up in North Carolina and has since lived in Spain, Guatemala, and the United Kingdom, where she resides. Her short fiction has won the Miami University Novella Prize, the Arts & Letters Fiction Prize, and the Florida Review’s Leiby Prize. Other stories have been published by Ploughshares, The Gettysburg Review, Narrative, and Nimrod. A former Carol Houck Smith Fellow at the University of Wisconsin, she has received additional support from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Vermont Studio Center, and the British Library. Those Who Vanish is her first book.

The stories in Patricia Grace King’s ravishing Those Who Vanish chronicle the consequences of inhabiting spaces both physical and psychic where one doesn’t naturally belong. In stories ranging from conflict-ravaged Guatemala to the American Midwest and beyond, King’s unrelenting exploration of our need to survive while retaining our humanity propels these narratives into surprising and heart-breaking terrain. As one character poignantly asks of another, ‘The real question is, do you want to be found?’ Those Who Vanish doesn’t present us with easy answers but masterfully interrogates what it means to be lost and the often-blinding nature of self-discovery.