Bookshop welcomes Booker Prize finalist Ruth Ozeki (A Tale for the Time Being), who will share her spellbinding story collection The Typing Lady: And Other Fictions 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. Ozeki will be in conversation with Karen Joy Fowler at this event.

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.

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.

More information at: Bookshop Santa Cruz – Ruth Ozeki

Co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz.