From Albertine's disappearance in Proust to a range of powerful representations of women's erasure, this book reveals a compelling truth: to be seen, women must be heard. Lane Glisson writes with the same candor she finds in the literature she explores, guiding us on a journey that feels like a quest-for the missing voices of women, and for the meaning of their absence. At once urgent and deeply reflective, this is a book about loss, visibility, and the possibility of desiring and belonging.

Stefania Porcelli, Doctoral Lecturer, Hunter College, USA

Disappearance and Candor in Contemporary Women's Writing is a powerful and necessary reexamination of how literature has long punished women who defy patriarchal norms-rendering them mad, silent, or erased. From Paul Bowles's The Sheltering Sky to Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Quartet, from Kamala Das's lyrical defiance to Cristina Rivera Garza's haunting metafictions, this volume traces how disappearance functions not merely as loss but as strategy: a deliberate act of resistance, refusal, and reinvention.
Through intersectional feminist theory and global case studies-from India to Mexico, from transfeminism to trauma narratives-the essays and creative works in this collection explore how silence and absence can become sites of critical witness, poetic agency, and radical transformation. Whether confronting state violence, gendered silencing, or internalized oppression, the women in these pages do not vanish quietly-they reappear through literary candor, narrative experimentation, and the reclaiming of voice.
A vital contribution to feminist literary studies, with Disappearance and Candor in Contemporary Women's Writing, Lane Glisson redefines erasure not as defeat, but as a generative space for autonomy, subversion, and survival.

Simona Wright, Professor of Italian, The College of New Jersey, USA

Lane Glisson has written a deeply thoughtful and urgently relevant book. With intellectual rigor and a clear, engaging style, she examines how contemporary women writers confront erasure, violence, and the burden of representation. I admire the transnational breadth of this study and the ethical commitment that animates every chapter. Glisson brings critical clarity to difficult subjects-misogyny, silencing, complicity-and reveals how literature offers refuge and reckoning. This is a timely and necessary work, grounded in feminist ethics and literary precision.

Sophie Maríñez, Professor of Modern Languages & Literatures, City University of New York, USA