Joanna Scott, author of ten critically acclaimed novels, now turns her "incandescent imagination" (Publishers Weekly) back to the craft of the short story, with breathtaking results. Ranging across history from the distant past to the future, Scott tours the many forms our stories can take, from cave wall paintings to radio banter to digitized archives, and the far-reaching consequences of our communications. In Venice in the Late Middle Ages, a painter's apprentice finds a way to make his mark on canvases that will survive for centuries. In the near future, after the literary canon has been preserved only on the cloud and then lost, a scholar tries to piece together a little-known school of writers committed to using actual paper. In present day New England, a radio host invites his electrician to stay for dinner, opening up new narrative possibilities for both men. Written in prose so naturally elegant, smooth, and precise that it becomes invisible, Excuse Me While I Disappear asks what remains of our stories--as individuals and civilizations--after we are gone.

On a summer day in 1946 Sally Werner, the precocious young daughter of hardscrabble Pennsylvania farmers, secretly accepts her cousin's invitation to ride his new motorcycle. Like so much of what follows in Sally's life, it's an impulsive decision with dramatic and far-reaching consequences. Soon she abandons her home to begin a daring journey of self-creation, the truth of which she entrusts only with her granddaughter and namesake, six decades later. But when young Sally's father--a man she has never known--enters her life and offers another story altogether, she must uncover the truth of her grandmother's secret history.
Boldly rendered and beautifully told, in FOLLOW ME Joanna Scott has crafted a paean to the American tradition of re-invention and a sweeping saga of timeless and tender storytelling.

"A greatly gifted and highly original artist...Various Antidotes is purely and simply wonderful."--"The New York Times Book Review"
The miraculous, transformative stories of Various Antidotes range across the world of history and science, alighting on figures both real and imaginary. The stories within are those of obsession and brilliance, of the ultimately human recognition that the world is larger than we believe it to be and that we, as figures within it, have through understanding the power to change that world. Whether through learning or madness or accident, the scientists and students within "Various Antidotes" expose us to the glorious blossom of the natural world.
"Scott writes with the crispest and most telling of sentences. Her grasp of the mysteries within us is profound."--"Newsday"
"What most amazes me about Joanna Scott's extraordinary narratives is the vastness of the world her imagination ranges through and the rich, Dickensian variety of voices and characters one encounters here...A brilliant and unique achievement."--Robert Coover
"Joanna Scott writes in the tradition of the great American storytellers - Hawthorne, Melville, Poe, Welty - a tradition in which romance is informed by moral consciousness."--Maureen Howard
"Joanna Scott's imagination is purest magic."--Guy Davenport
"One of the most original and enchanting voices in modern fiction...These stories are filled with utterly unanticipatable delights."--Robert Olen Butler
Joanna Scott is the author of seven books of fiction, including the novels" Tourmaline" and "Arrogance," She is a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and a Lannan Award, and lives with her family in Rochester, NewYork.

In Joanna Scott's breakthrough novel the Austrian artist Egon Schiele comes to prismatic life in a narrative that defies convention, history, and identity. A self-professed genius and student of August Klimt, Scott's Schiele repeatedly challenges the boundaries of early twentieth-century Europe. Thrown in jail on charges of immorality, Schiele's Mephistophelean reputation only grows in stature until at the age of twenty-eight, the artist dies in the Great Flu Pandemic. Told from a crosscurrent of voices, viewpoints and times, this stunning novel won Scott a nomination for the 1991 PEN/Faulkner Award.

The Manikin is not a mannequin, but the curious estate of Henry Craxton, Sr. in a rural western New York State. Dubbed the “Henry Ford of Natural History,” by 1917 Craxton has become America’s preeminent taxidermist. Into this magic box of a world—filled with eerily inanimate gibbons and bats, owls and peacocks, quetzals and crocodiles—wanders young Peg Griswood, daughter of Craxton’s newest housekeeper. Part coming-of-age story, part gothic mystery, and part exploration of the intimate embrace between art and life, The Manikin is compulsively readable and beautifully written.

The world of "Make Believe" into which we are drawn in this remarkable novel—hailed for both its lyrical prose and its profound dramatic and emotional intensity—is the world of four-year-old Bo, cast adrift in a sea of strangers as he becomes the focus of a fierce custody battle between two sets of grandparents, one black and one white.

"The opening sections of Make Believe, which depict Bo's experience of the car accident that killed his mother and his new life with his paternal grandparents, are as powerful as anything the gifted Ms. Scott has written. They possess the unsettling intensity of Benjy's interior monologue in Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury. . . . The penultimate chapter, which sends Bo's life skidding off in yet another direction, contains a dazzling set piece that showcases all of Ms. Scott's virtuosic skills."
—Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

This universally acclaimed novel-everywhere hailed for its evocative descriptions, its compelling characters, its intricate plot-transports us to Elba, an island off the northwest coast of Italy, in the mid-1950s. It is here that an American man, seduced by the wealth promised in the island's surfeit of semiprecious tourmaline, has traveled with his wife and four young sons, and now struggles to establish a homestead and a fortune. But the allure of one of Elba's other treasures-a bewitching local girl-derails his quest and threatens to destroy his family.

Adriana Nardi is only ten years old when Allied forces occupy her lush island home during World War II, plaguing the quiet Italian village with violence and uncertainty. Amdu is a Senegalese soldier who abandons his comrades and befriends Adriana after witnessing an unspeakable act that has far-reaching repercussions. Years later, on a commuter train bound for Penn Station, sixty-year-old Adriana revisits her memories of the war and her doomed relationship with Amdu, even as a present crisis threatens her life.

At the seaside wedding of two lovers kept apart by the caprices of fate, a doting uncle looks on while his errant brother, father of the bride, struggles to free himself from a locked bathroom across town. A young woman arrives in Jazz Age New York with stars in her eyes and a few coins in her pocket and after a string of failed jobs, she thinks she's found salvation in a romance with her boss at a local greasy spoon but learns that her idea of herself and others' ideas of her are quite different. A bright business man seems content with all the trappings his good fortune affords, until a flat tire and a chance encounter with a couple of mechanics in the country upsets his entire view. Joanna Scott offers a group of tales that celebrate her acknowledged sense of character, plot and her gift for capturing the breathtaking tension even in life's quietest moments.