The Typing Lady
And Other Fictions
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- Pre-Order
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- Expected 2 Jun 2026
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- 10,99 €
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- Pre-Order
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- 10,99 €
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The writer protagonists of these stimulating metafictional stories from Ozeki (A Tale for the Time Being) long for connection and creative fulfillment. The title entry, framed as an author's note, concerns a short story called "The Typing Lady," written by a woman who caught the attention of the narrator at a library. The protagonist of this story within the story, also a writer, collects old typewriters in a quest to reconnect with her late mother, a poet who clacked out her work on a Remington. "Ships in the Night" traces aspiring romance author Cayenne's vagabond life with her teen daughter, Baby, and Cayenne's benevolent drug-dealing boyfriend, Guy. Much of the story takes place in Vancouver, where Guy protects Baby from a predatory man, while Baby longs for stability. In the hilarious "Dead Beat Poet," a young woman named Caitlin puts her dream of becoming a poet on the back burner while working as an editorial assistant at a publishing house. During an editorial meeting, Caitlin is suddenly possessed by the ghost of a poet who claims he was friends with Allen Ginsberg and tells her the publisher should focus on poetry, causing Caitlin to blurt out "more poems!" In Ozeki's sure hands, the story channels the ghost's dated braggadocio into a timely rant against corporate workplace woes, as when he calls Caitlin's boss a "one-eyed shrew who does nothing but sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden threads of the craftsman's loom." Ozeki's atmospheric tales radiate with intelligence and wit.
