Ruth Ozeki

September 01st, 2026

Raised in Connecticut by a Japanese mother and American father, dual Canadian-American citizen Ruth Ozeki divides her time among Cortes Island, New York City and western Massachusetts. A novelist, filmmaker, Zen Buddhist priest and Smith College professor emerita, Ozeki has published her first short story collection, The Typing Lady and Other Fictions (Penguin Canada $38), and it is a hoot. Mixing realism, satire, metafiction, autofiction and the surreal, its eleven stories explore ambition, desire, ageing, memory and lives not lived. Writing—and its tools, from typewriters and letters to disappearing ink—provides a shared motif. The laughs come courtesy of characters such as an online-snooping grandmother and a dead Beat poet who possesses a publishing assistant. 9780735249813

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