The Vanishers

Zusatztext 41014520 Informationen zum Autor HEIDI JULAVITS is the author of four critically acclaimed novels ( The Vanishers , The Uses of Enchantment , The Effect of Living Backwards , and The Mineral Palace ) and co-editor, with Sheila Heti and Leanne Shapton, of the New York Times bestseller Women in Clothes . Her fiction has appeared in Harper's Magazine , McSweeney’s , and The Best American Short Stories , among other places. She's a founding editor of The Believer magazine and the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. She lives in Manhattan, where she teaches at Columbia University. She was born and raised in Portland, Maine. Klappentext From acclaimed novelist and editor of The Believer Heidi Julavits, comes a wildly imaginative novel about grief, female rivalry, and the furious power of a daughter's love. Julia Severn is a talented student at an elite institute for psychics. When Julia's mentor, the legendary Madame Ackerman, grows jealous of her protégée's talents, she subjects Julia to the painful humiliation of reliving her mother's suicide . . . and then launches a desperate psychic attack. But Julia's gifts, though a threat to her teacher, prove an asset to others. Soon she's recruited to track down a missing person who might have a connection to her mother. As Julia sifts through ghosts and astral clues, everything she thought she knew about her mother is called into question, and she discovers that her ability to know the minds of others-including her own-goes far deeper than she ever imagined.The story I’m about to tell could be judged preposterous. Fine. Judge how you must. Protect yourself by scare-­quoting me as the so-­called psychic, the so-­called victim of a psychic attack. Quarantine this account however you must so that you can safely hear it. What happened to me could never happen to you. Tell yourself that. Even though what happened to me happens to people like you all the time. In the beginning, an attack can look just like regular life. You wake to discover eyelashes on your pillow, bruises on your skin where you’ve never been touched. You smell a stranger on your bedsheets and that stranger is you. As the weeks pass, you notice other humiliations. An unceasing bout of acid reflux and an irritable bowel. Gums that bleed when you sip hot tea. Fingernails that snap when you push your hands through the sleeves of a sweater. The ghostly withdrawal of pigmentation from your cheeks. A rash on your torso. A rash on your hands. A rash on your scalp. And so it goes, your body’s hurtle along a failure trajectory that no doctor can explain. There is only the numb leg, the searing esophagus, the face—­its frostbit complexion, its vinegar stare—­you no longer recognize as your own. I’m overworked and need to take more vitamins, you’ll tell yourself. Maybe I’m allergic to wheat or my new car. Maybe I’m depressed, or not enough in love anymore with my life, my spouse, my self. You’ll schedule beach vacations or more time at the gym, but no matter how many times you dunk yourself in oceans or flush the liquid content of your body through your pores, you can’t escape the suspicion that a cancer drifts through your anatomy, that it will soon metastasize to your personality, that it is only a matter of time before it breaches the cellular firewall encircling your soul. When this happened to me, I did what people do: I saw my doctor. She sent me to another doctor. And he to another. I saw so many, many doctors. I was pricked and I was bled, I was leashed to computers, scanners, drips, I was MRI-­ed, EEG-­ed, and CT-­scanned, my body subjected to a battery of lie detector tests that, because the claims it spouted were deemed inconclusive, it apparently did not pass. I acquired a medical file so thick it practically required its own gurney to be moved. I was greet...

Product details

• Authors: Heidi Julavits
• Publisher: Anchor Books USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 08.01.2013
• EAN: 9780307387363
• ISBN: 978-0-307-38736-3
• No. of pages: 304
• Dimensions: 132 mm x 203 mm x 17 mm
• Subject: Fiction > Science fiction, fantasy