As a writer, there are a few tiers you may find yourself falling onto. Being a non-confrontational sort of person (oh, those Pisces — just so sensitive, you know?) I’ll refrain from ranking said tiers, but I will do the bare minimum and differentiate.

There are two types of Household Names. Strain A of Household Names are so pervasive that even a young Hellen Keller would have a hard time escaping them: Stephen King, Nora Roberts, Danielle “superfluous use of adjectives like ‘velvety’ or ‘dazzling”” Steele.

Then there is Strain B of Household Names, subtype Not-Really-Indie-Indies, the literary equivalent of films like I Heart Huckabees or Little Miss Sunshine. Hollywood? Not quite. But art house? I don’t think so. These writers are more often known by their works than their names — The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Milan Kundera), What is the What (Valentino Achak Deng), A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (Dave Eggers).

Then, we have those writers who are not exactly obscure, for no writer, published, in print, read by eyes not belonging to friends and family and exes who cock their heads and wonder, Is that character me? is ever really obscure. But they are not household names, not even in the homes of self-styled intellectuals who make lots of references to Camus or Colette.

Kate Braverman is one of these not-exactly-obscurities. Born in 1950 and based in L.A., I feel Braverman deserves a bit of applause for her ventures into experimental hybrids of prose and poetry. Her short story “Vanishing Acts,” featured in the Spring 2004 issue of the Mississippi Review, goes out on a limb — out on a tightrope — and dashes plot and character to the ground in favor of sheer atmosphere. How lazy, bitter aspiring writers may be tempted to think — but “Vanishing Acts” is anything but. Braverman successfully takes an abstract concept and manages to conjure up exactly what she means while never directly explaining herself.

“This is how to vanish,” her — story? poem? essay? — begins. “[Vanished women] wear boots because they prefer walking,” she writes. “It’s the only way to become intimate with a city. You must kiss each brick, each cobblestone with your feet.”

We are never allowed to know explicitly what a vanished woman is. But we feel it. The writing is heard with the bones, not the eyes.