In "My Brother Stanley," a girl knows her dead half-brother only from photographs and a portrait. Some stories depict growing up in a disjointed, unloving family. The budding relationship ends when one of the two women, a writer suffering doubts about her own writing skill, has reservations about her newfound friend. In "Leaper," two women meet after another woman throws herself under a train. Etching the princess's likeness onto the mirror, the soldiers create what Diski (1947 2016) calls the earliest example of cubist art. A passing soldier brings food, and then another soldier brings a mirror. As the narrator explains, no one told the princess curiosity was a quality worth cultivating. The title story's vanishing princess never asks about the world outside her tower. Three stories feature fairy tale heroines: two princesses confined to towers, one miller's daughter tasked with spinning straw into gold. The dozen stories of this excellent posthumous collection look at isolation, anxiety, sex, the roles women play, and the attempts of men to define those roles, all from a female perspective.
The Vanishing Princess is another vital stop on Jenny Diski’s journey for meaning and beauty in her prolific writing, one that feels as fresh and necessary as if it were brand-new. Longtime fans of Diski and those who have discovered her since her death will find much to treasure here, in her only short story collection, released in the US for the very first time. In “Short Curcuit,” the author mines her own bouts in and out of mental institutions outside London to question whether those we think are mad are really the sanest among us. “Bathtime” tells the story of a woman’s life through her attempts to build the perfect bathtub, chasing an elusive moment of peace. In a Rumpelstiltskin fairy tale turned on its head, a miller’s daughter rises to power and wealth to rule over her kingdom and outwit the title villain. The stories in The Vanishing Princess showcase a rarely seen side of this beloved writer, channeling both the piercing social examination of her nonfiction and the vivid, dreamlike landscapes of her novels. In a cool and unflinching tone that came to define her singular voice, she explored the subjects of sex, power, domesticity, femininity, hysteria, and loneliness with humor and honesty,
When she died of cancer in April 2016, after chronicling her illness in strikingly honest essays in the London Review of Books, readers, admirers, and critics around the world mourned the loss. Jenny Diski’s prose is as sharp and steely as her imagination is wild and wondrous. “Mordant and talon-sharp.” -Dwight Garner, New York Times, on Jenny Diski The only story collection from the beloved Jenny Diski-darkly funny, subversive, sexy, and eccentric tales from one of the most original and intelligent voices of our time
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