The Massage of Erasure by Shmuel Barber is a collection of absurd, surreal, and visceral stories where identity buckles under pressure and the borders between body, memory, and language break apart. Guilt takes on its own geometry. Love ferments. Nature watches without mercy. Dreams misbehave, and bureaucracy becomes a slow kind of annihilation.

Across forests, frozen lakes, cramped flats, and collapsing inner worlds, characters try to rewrite themselves, escape themselves, or be rid of themselves entirely. Whether through coercion, intimacy, self-erasure, or the quiet will of nature, each story reveals the strange choreography of being human when the self starts to come undone.

Dark, unsettling, and unexpectedly tender, The Massage of Erasure explores what happens in the cracks where identity fails, and something else begins.