And the novel moves through the calendar year, segment by segment, from April through December. The first segment is about a seventeen-year-old guy, and the final one is about a guy in his seventies. The basic structure is that the central character in each segment is five to ten years older than the central character in the previous one. The novel consists of nine separate segments. We met last March in Paris for a public conversation at the historic Shakespeare and Company bookstore, which over the years has served many Paris Review editors, interns, and readers as a home away from home.

In 2013, Granta named him one of its best young British novelists-an understandable misnomer, given his accent and his air of polite reserve. He is the author of three previous novels, London and the South-East, The Innocent, and Spring. He grew up in London, was educated at Oxford, and currently lives in Budapest. Szalay (pronounced SOL-loy) was born in Montreal in 1974 to a Hungarian father and a Canadian mother. furiously, unappeasably, in two days” Melissa Katsoulis, in the Times of London: “It’s hard to imagine reading a better book this year”). This year’s prize winner, David Szalay, contributed two stories to the Review, “Youth” and “Lascia Amor e siegui Marte.” Each is part of a longer work, All That Man Is, which will appear in the United States this fall and has already garnered ecstatic reviews in the British press (Michael Hofmann, in the London Review of Books : “I read All That Man Is. Every year, The Paris Review honors one newcomer to our pages with the Plimpton Prize for Fiction.

All that man is by david szalay