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And Other Fictions
by Ruth Ozeki
A spellbinding story collection from Booker Prize finalist Ruth Ozeki, about the lives we almost lived, the people we can't quite forget, and the stories that shape us long after the last page is turned.
In this spirited and emotionally resonant collection, award-winning novelist Ruth Ozeki turns her singular gaze to the short story, exploring childhood ambition, youthful desire, midlife reinvention, and the unsparing clarity of old age. With her distinctive blend of wit, warmth, and deep humanity, she brings us eleven richly imagined stories of characters standing at life's thresholds—grappling with faded ideals, evolving identities, and the inevitable compromises that shape a life.
A college student falls for her professor and learns to transmute longing into language. A disquieted husband watches with tenderness and unease as the ghost of his wife's ambition roams the woods outside their home. A long-deceased Beat poet hijacks the mind of a young publishing assistant during a sales meeting, railing against the state of modern literature. A curious grandmother creates a fake online dating profile to spy on her granddaughter's romantic life—and sets in motion a deception she can't control.
Spanning eras and geographies—from a New England college town in the 1970s to downtown Manhattan in the 1990s to a moss-covered Pacific Northwest island during the early pandemic—The Typing Lady is an electrifying meditation on the stories we tell ourselves, the stories we abandon, and the stories we become. Threaded with the tactile ephemera of writing—typewriters, letters, manuscripts, and disappearing ink—the book reveals how we record ourselves in language, and how language, over time, records us in return.
"Ozeki's atmospheric tales radiate with intelligence and wit." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Longing and loss sometimes lead to understanding in this reflective collection of 11 short pieces..[Ozeki shows] warmth toward the fiction-making process—and her characters...Tender, mysterious, and moving." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"The act of writing—on keyboards, in letters, even with disappearing ink—connects Ozeki's tales as bearing witness to lives lived and as records for readers now and to come." —Booklist (starred review)
"Delightful, moving, and profound, The Typing Lady is a book of love stories of every kind. It is a book of great treasures." —Lily King, New York Times bestselling author of Heart the Lover
This information about The Typing Lady was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Ruth Ozeki is a novelist, filmmaker, and Zen Buddhist priest. She is the bestselling author of four novels: The Book of Form and Emptiness, winner of the UK's 2022 Women's Prize for Fiction; My Year of Meats; All Over Creation; and A Tale for the Time Being, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and was a finalist for the 2013 Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her nonfiction work includes a memoir, The Face: A Time Code, and the documentary film Halving the Bones. A longtime Buddhist practitioner, Ruth is affiliated with the Brooklyn Zen Center and the Everyday Zen Foundation. She is a professor emerita of English language and literature at Smith College, where she was the Grace Jarcho Ross 1933 Professor of Humanities.
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