What binds this story to the collection is the feministly interrogative nature. It bothers me personally that I came to Diski so late in my reading life, because she was writing the books that I only recently realized I couldn’t wait to read. Lillian starts thinking about ducks and ends up deconstructing her romantic relationship with a man named Charlie, whom she fears is a cheat. Lillian athletically muses as a means to analyze, unpack, and cover miles of intellectual and emotional ground between typically disparate landmarks. “Short Circuit,” the story that appears here, begins, “It was Lillian’s habit to take a walk every lunchtime.” But such an opening sentence is not a staid pace-setter instead, it is a launch-pad. These stories start with lines that appear well behaved.

Then there are the more typically realist stories that explore contemporary womanhood from less of a slant. “Bath Time” tracks a woman’s lifelong dream to have a perfect bath, and balances the absurd with the penny-pinching real. “Leaper” starts on a frank, smart-alecky Grace Paley note before stealthily shifting into oblique emotional territory (I’d say more about this story but I don’t want to ruin anything). The title story reads like a cheekier, more bitingly urbane take on one of Angela Carter’s stories from The Bloody Chamber. Originally published in England in 1995, the stories rove across the aesthetic map. The stories collected in The Vanishing Princess reveal a writer avidly experimenting with voice and structure and execution.

Jenny diski the vanishing princess