Ruth Ozeki: The Typing Lady

This is the first story collection from the Booker Prize finalist and winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction. It’s 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.

Exploring childhood ambition, youthful desire, midlife reinvention and the unsparing clarity of old age, Ozeki brings us 11 richly imagined stories of characters standing at life’s thresholds. A college student falls for her professor and learns to transmute longing into language. A disquieted husband watches 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 and rails 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, 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.

Ruth Ozeki is a novelist, filmmaker and Zen Buddhist priest. She is the award-winning author of four novels: My Year of Meats, All Over Creation, A Tale for the Time Being – which was shortlisted for the 2013 Man Booker Prize and translated into 28 languages – and The Book of Form and Emptiness, which won the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2022.

Her nonfiction work includes the documentary film Halving the Bones and the short memoir The Face: A Time Code. She is affiliated with the Everyday Zen Foundation and lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, where she taught creative writing at Smith College and was the Grace Jarcho Ross 1933 Professor Emerita of Humanities.

Cathy Rentzenbrink is a regular speaker and chair of literary events, and a writer whose books include The Last Act of Love, Write It All Down and Ordinary Time.