Vanishing Monuments

Reviews

“An enchanting story with a truly compelling protagonist, Stintzi has marked themself as a writer to watch.” — Seattle Times

“A surreal, poetic meditation on the struggle to feel at home with the past, family, and one's own body.” — Kirkus Reviews

“The real pleasure of reading John Elizabeth Stintzi's book is to see a sensitive mind work through an internal landscape, and to watch them do it with such patience and generosity.” — Sara Majka, author of Cities I've Never Lived In

“Vanishing Monuments is a remarkable novel, a beautiful puzzle of place and belonging, identity and vocation, duty and love. John Elizabeth Stintzi’s writing is full of welcome and true surprise — I found myself underlining passages on every page, and then going back to underline more.” — John K. Samson, musician and poet

“Vanishing Monuments is a beautiful portrait of disassociation at once between countries, family, gender, identities, and, most importantly, “the distance between … you and yourself.” Stintzi braids the Metamorphoses together with the expansiveness of Winnipeg, those rolling prairies, all wondrously and ravenously superimposed together to form a work that is wet with memory. With a keen eye for image and an attuned ear for the whistling screams of Manitoba, we move slowly but steadily through the memory palace that is a childhood home abandoned — here, memory serves to animate said house with a beckoning siren call that asks us to conceptualize the art of staying affectively with a mother whittling away from dementia and a narrator storytelling from a double exposed aperture. An absolute monumental achievement of a first novel.” — Joshua Whitehead, author of Jonny Appleseed