Vanished

The winner of the 2021 Raz-Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction is Karin Lin-Greenberg for her manuscript Vanished, chosen by Guest Judges Kaylie Jones and Achy Obejas with Editor-in-Chief Kwame Dawes. She will receive a $3,000 award and publication by the University of Nebraska Press.

Karin Lin-Greenberg is the author of the story collection Faulty Predictions (University of Georgia Press 2014), which won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, and the novel You Are Here (Counterpoint 2023). Her stories have appeared in publications including The Antioch Review, The Southern Review, Story, and the Chicago Tribune, where she was a finalist for the Nelson Algren Award. She is a recipient of a Pushcart Prize, and her work will appear in the 2022 anthology. She is an associate professor in the English Department at Siena College, where she teaches creative writing.

About the Book

Winner of the Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction, Vanished tells the stories of women and girls in upstate New York who are often overlooked or unseen by the people around them. The characters range from an aging art professor whose students are uninterested in learning what she has to teach, to a young girl who becomes the victim of a cruel prank in a swimming pool, to a television producer who regrets allowing her coworkers into her mother’s bird-filled house to film a show about animal hoarding because it will reveal too much about her family and past.

Humorous and empathetic, the collection exposes the adversity in each character’s life; each deals with something or someone who has vanished—a person close to her, a friendship, a relationship—as she seeks to make sense of the world around her in the wake of that loss.

Praise

“Lin-Greenberg’s flawless and insightful prose gives an acute sense of the characters’ perspectives as they change. This accomplished work is full of surprises.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review

“In this compassionate, unapologetic, and hilarious collection, Karin Lin-Greenberg’s unmistakably unique voice shines. The human struggle for connection guides us through each story’s surprising world of art, pop culture, school, difficult relationships, and weird animals. I fell in love with these edgy, lost characters who bump into enlightenment by accident, and only after wading through oceans of denial and terrible choices. Vanished is a celebration of our flawed humanity.”—Erika Krouse, author of Tell Me Everything: The Story of a Private Investigation

“The stories in Karin Lin-Greenberg’s Vanished do not shy away from our current moment of division and estrangement. Like Richard Yates’s Eleven Kinds of Loneliness or Stephanie Vaughn’s Sweet Talk, Lin-Greenberg’s Vanished is peopled with characters who are bitter and funny and who do questionable things—and who are, as a result, imminently human, unquestioningly alive on the page. An engrossing and extraordinary book by a true master of the form.”—Nick White, author of Sweet and Low