Sam Sacks. Fiction: 'The Disappearing Act' by Maria Stepanova // The Wall Street Journal. March 26, 2026. 

"A fable of self-erasure plays out, elegantly translated by Sasha Dugdale. Railway strikes kibosh M’s itinerary. Her phone dies, and she loses her charger. She disembarks in an unfamiliar city with no idea where to go. As she drifts through town, feeling suddenly shorn of her identity, she comes across a traveling circus and is somehow taken on as a volunteer for the sawing-in-half trick, which involves hiding inside a box. Each step of this increasingly surreal tale dramatizes—that is, gives form to—an act of vanishing. "