This week, a new and very interesting book, dear friends, Yang Shuang-zi’s 2020 novel, Taiwan Travelogue. Originally published in Taiwan,   this book has been short-listed for the 2026 International Booker Prize and was translated to English by Lin King in 2024. What the heck is very interesting about this novel? you say. Well, on the surface, it appears to be a reprint of an old travel book about a Japanese woman visiting Taiwan in the late 1930s. The publisher has taken pai

This just in— The Wax Child  did not make the cut for the International Booker Prize short list. Oh, oh, the wax child isn’t going to like that. The Wax Child  by Olga Ravn is a story set in historic time—early 17 th  century Denmark. However, there is no statement of this in the beginning of the text. Of course, due to a phenomenon we have previously noted, the reader who comes to this book no doubt has some preconceptions that may include the story’s historic setting. Indee

Last time, I proposed discussing the effect of utilizing an inanimate narrator in Olga Ravn’s The Wax Child . Here goes: This is not the first story to have an inanimate narrator. Orhan Pamuk’s My Name Is Red features narration by the color red; a fig tree does the job in Elif Shafak's  The Island of Missing Trees . (‘Kay, a tree is alive, but you get the idea). Indeed, we could say that many novels feature an omniscient narrator with no identifying information provided abou

“No one listens to a thing I say. Although I speak all the time.” So says the unnamed, inanimate narrator of Olga Ravn’s The Wax Child . Who hears it then? Someone—more on this later. What we know about this narrator is that it was created by Christenze Crucknow, who carried this wax effigy beneath her right arm as if it was a real human infant in utero. Why, you ask, would someone do this, making an effigy and treating it in this manner?   “Wax effigies in witchcraft are fig

This week, a new story, Olga Ravn’s 2025 novel, The Wax Child . This book, translated to English from Danish by Matin Aitken, has been nominated for an International Booker Prize. It begins: “I am a child shaped in beeswax. I am made like a doll the size of a human forearm. They have given me hair and nail parings from the person who is to suffer. I was born by my mistress for forty weeks under her right arm as if I was a proper child, and my wax was softened by her warmth. A

When we left off looking at the fourth story in David Szalay’s All That Man Is,  the protagonist, Balazs, a twenty-eight-year-old Hungarian man on business in London, has just experienced a somewhat enchanted afternoon with Emma, the object of his erotic longing. Emma, who has always seemed unapproachable and distant, shows Balazs a new side, expressing curiosity and affection toward him, which he finds stunning. Her questions force him to confront his lonely and meaningless

We left off last time in our consideration of David Szalay’s fourth story in the collection All That Man Is,  with the protagonist, Balazs, realizing, perhaps belatedly, that the object of his erotic obsession, Emma, is a high-class prostitute. Moreover, he is employed by her husband, Gabor, to provide security for her during a working trip to London. “It is awkward, especially that first night.” This describes Balazs’ experience sitting most of the night in a car with Gabor,

I was going to embark on a new story this week, a new book, that is, but I’ve been enjoying the David Szalay book, All That Man Is , so much that I wanted to focus on one more of its stories, the third one, also untitled. As we’ve noted, all the stories in this collection have as their protagonist, a man of a particular age. This story has to do with Balazs, a Hungarian man in his late twenties. So, in keeping with the rest of the book, we would expect this story to explore i

Last time, we left off amidst David Szalay’s linked short story collection All That Man Is . We were studying the final story which deals with Tony, a man near the end of his life. Unfortunately for Tony, he has just been in a serious car accident and is recovering. We the readers wonder if this traumatic experience leads to some transformation in a character who is darkly focused on the meaninglessness of his life. Tony’s wife Joanna drives him home from the hospital. “On th

Hello. We are in the middle of examining the final, untitled story in David Szalay’s collection All That Man Is . Last time, we noted how things begin with the protagonist, a seventy-three-year-old man named Tony, pre-occupied with thoughts of death and the end of his individual existence which seems to make his life lack meaning. As we continue, Tony talks to the cleaning lady and has breakfast. He checks email and reads one from his daughter Cordelia (King Lear fans take no

Hello, we’re back! Today, we’ll examine the final (ninth of nine) story in David Szalay’s book, All That Man Is . To begin this one, there is no title, but we have an epigraph:   Time will say nothing but I told you so, Time only knows the price we have to pay; If I could tell you I would let you know.   This is the beginning of W.H. Auden’s 1940 poem, If I Could Tell You. We’ve noted how Mr. Szalay seems to appreciate the poet Philip Larkin and weave Larkin’s style into his

Last time, we left off studying the fourth, unnamed story in David Szalay’s All That Man Is , a tale of a man in his early thirties, an English graduate student who is involved in a love affair with a woman named Waleria. The protagonist (whose name is Karel—I forgot that he was named last time) is delivering an expensive, leased car to a man in Poland, a man who happens to be Valeria’s father, and plans to meet Valeria and spend a few days with her at a German resort. We saw

This time, let’s examine the fourth story in David Szalay’s All That Man Is . It is untitled and tells a tale about an unnamed man who we can infer is about thirty years old. He is English, a graduate student at Oxford in Medieval German Languages, and is involved with a Polish woman, who is named, Waleria. He has a side job of delivering leased luxury cars throughout Europe, and the story occurs during one of these deliveries when he’s arranged to meet up with Waleria and st

We left off seeking answers to the question, “What Am I Doing Here?” which is posed in the first story in David Szalay’s linked story collection All That Man Is . Each story in this book covers different men who progress in age from youth to old age, so in this first story where the protagonist, Simon, is seventeen, the question is, what is a seventeen-year-old doing here in his life? Last time, I mentioned the influence of the British poet Philip Larkin on this story and the

Today, let’s look at David Szalay’s (pronounced SOL-loy) 2015 book, “ All That Man Is .” Mr. Szalay recently won the Booker Prize for his novel, “ Flesh .” The book is a series of nine linked short stories—not that they share characters but have similar themes. Each concerns a man of a defined age, beginning with seventeen and continuing up to seventy-three, who is usually away from home and becomes pre-occupied with questioning the meaning of his life. Well, okay, all of us

Cesar Pavese’s novella The House on the Hill  has an unconventional structure, one that lulls the reader into thinking things will be one way, and then showing them as being different, thereby underscoring the story’s point about wartime trauma. As mentioned last time, the story, which takes place during a “state of siege” in 1943 Italy, has to do with a man—the narrator—who escapes the nightly bombing of Turin by going to the countryside. There he meets Cate, a fellow refuge

Last time, we talked about how Pavese’s The House on the Hill  fits/doesn’t fit into expectations of traditional story structure. Essentially, this is the story of a 40-year-old man, a teacher, who is living in the midst of WWII in Turin, Italy. To escape the nightly Allied bombing raids, he and many others go to the countryside to sleep, returning to the city in the morning to work. The narrator—this man—is single; he ruminates at length about how a solitary life is the best

I have decided not to do a post this week on Pavese's The House on the Hill . Why? you ask. I had one ready but was not satisfied. The story is so great, and I felt my post was not doing it justice. I will return next week, never fear.

I'm happy to announce that my short story "The Return" is a finalist in Narrative Magazine's Fall Story Contest. Many thanks to Tom Jenks and everyone at Narrative. I haven't done so much with short stories recently as I've been working on a novel which I hope will be done soon. So, this news from Narrative was very encouraging. Thanks again.

Traditionally, stories, long and short, follow a structure—in fact one who veers very far out of this structure risks losing a reader’s attention, conditioned as we are to the familiar. A story is typically about the transformation or failed transformation of a central character who may or may not be the narrator. A story begins with the showing of this character’s existence pre-transformation. A short way in, an event occurs which sets the process of transformation into moti