Jenny Erpenbeck | Things That Disappear | New Directions | October 2025 | 96 PagesOn YouTube and Instagram, there’s a genre of video I sometimes get recommended: furniture restoration. Those things we love, those things that, as H. D. Thoreau and Tyler Durden both observed, sometimes come to own us: we can save them. Jenny Erpenbeck’s latest non-fiction work, Things That Disappear, is organized around the unpleasant antithesis: everything fails us, eventually. Adrift toward Italy, things started to disappear: food, water, a compass, any sense of direction. And so too, Things That Disappear is, I think, best read in conjunction with her other books.