Between Appear and Disappear

by Doug Rice

Some memories are transformed into myths at the very moment that they are remembered. Stories are told for those who have vanished, for the loves that have been lost. Language is borne out of this absence.

In spare yet luminous prose, Between Appear and Disappear is a lyrical love story of Mai and Doug, and of the way that memoir is turned into myth.

"An unforgettable and perfect book."
-Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Book of Joan

In Japan, the concept of ma (間) - literally "the gap", "the space", or the interval that glues one space to another, people, people to objects, and even what we are as human being s - predominates how we live, who we are, and how we interact with things around us. In Doug Rice's Between Appear and Disappear, this concept appears again and again: the muted space between Mai and "Doug", the tension between photographs and texts, fiction and nonfiction, meditation and action. What is this book - is this a philosophical book on loss and time? A book about aesthetics of photography? A love story? A memoir? A book of photographs with texts, or a narrative with photographs? But this is what is apparent: the world in this hybrid book is the in-between ma, where what is visible and invisible, knowable and unknowable, what is uttered and what isn't uttered, gentleness and terribleness, mythic and mundane, all come together to show us, through Rice's exacting words, a new way of looking at this world that is both cruel and beautiful. This is a terrifying book to read - illuminating, wise, philosophical, and, at the end, devastating.

-Mariko Nagai, author of Irradiated Cities

110 pages, Paperback

Published October 7, 2019

About the author

Doug Rice is the author of When Love Was, Here Lies Memory, An Erotics of Seeing, Dream Memoirs of a Fabulist, Faraway, So Close, Between Appear and Disappear, The Sacred Book of Silence (translated into the German as Das Heilige Buch der Stille), Blood of Mugwump (translated into the French as Le Sang des Mugwump), Skin Prayer: fragments of abject memory, and A Good CuntBoy is Hard to Find. His work has appeared in numerous anthologies qnd journals including Dirty: Dirty, Avant Pop: Fiction for a Daydream Nation, Alice Redux, Kiss the Sky, Phantoms of Desire, Discourse, Gargoyle, Zyzzyvya, Fiction International, and others. He is the recipient of an Arts Residency at the Akademie Schloss Solitude (Stuttgart, Germany) 2010-2012. He teaches Creative Writing and Film Studies. He has a B.A. from Slippery Rock State College, studied for an MA under John Gardner at SUNY-Binghamton, has an MA from Duquesne University and studied for his PhD at the University of Pittsburgh.