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 twelve 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.

The apocalypse will be televised! A man. His ex-girlfriend's cat. A sadistic game show unlike anything in the universe: a dungeon crawl where survival depends on killing your prey in the most entertaining way possible. In a flash, every human-erected construction on Earth—from Buckingham Palace to the tiniest of sheds—collapses in a heap, sinking into the ground. The buildings and all the people inside have all been atomized and transformed into the dungeon: an 18-level labyrinth filled with traps, monsters, and loot. A dungeon so enormous, it circles the entire globe. Only a few dare venture inside. But once you're in, you can't get out. And what's worse, each level has a time limit. You have but days to find a staircase to the next level down, or it's game over. In this game, it's not about your strength or your dexterity. It's about your followers, your views. Your clout. It's about building an audience and killing those goblins with style. You can't just survive here. You gotta survive big. You gotta fight with vigor, with excitement. You gotta make them stand up and cheer. And if you do have that "it" factor, you may just find yourself with a following. That's the only way to truly survive in this game—with the help of the loot boxes dropped upon you by the generous benefactors watching from across the galaxy. They call it Dungeon Crawler World. But for Carl, it's anything but a game.

From the award-winning film director and New York Times bestselling author of If Cats Disappeared from the World, a surreal novelization of his hit film Exit 8, adapting the indie horror game of the same name. A path with no beginning, no end. A man with a life-changing decision to make finds himself trapped in a seemingly infinite corridor in a Tokyo subway station. Each time he passes through the sterile, quiet hallway, he discovers himself back at its beginning, walking past the same doors, the same posters, and disturbingly, the same people, as he did the previous time. He soon discovers that in order to reach the elusive "Exit 8", he must look more closely at his surroundings, and notice the tunnel's bizarre anomalies. Spot one, and he must turn back. Spot none, and he can proceed. Make it to eight, and he'll be free. Make a mistake, and he must start over again. As he stumbles through an endless loop of conformity, confronting the strange, new possibilities of his own life, he begins to wonder if anomalies are not things to be feared but to be embraced. Maybe, he thinks, the only way out is through.

From the award-winning film director and New York Times bestselling author of If Cats Disappeared from the World, a surreal novelization of his hit film Exit 8, adapting the indie horror game of the same name. A path with no beginning, no end. A man with a life-changing decision to make finds himself trapped in a seemingly infinite corridor in a Tokyo subway station. Each time he passes through the sterile, quiet hallway, he discovers himself back at its beginning, walking past the same doors, the same posters, and disturbingly, the same people, as he did the previous time. He soon discovers that in order to reach the elusive "Exit 8", he must look more closely at his surroundings, and notice the tunnel's bizarre anomalies. Spot one, and he must turn back. Spot none, and he can proceed. Make it to eight, and he'll be free. Make a mistake, and he must start over again. As he stumbles through an endless loop of conformity, confronting the strange, new possibilities of his own life, he begins to wonder if anomalies are not things to be feared but to be embraced. Maybe, he thinks, the only way out is through.