All That Man Is

“Szalay’s prose . . . is frequently brilliant, remarkable for its grace and economy . . . [All That Man Is] has a new urgency now that the post-Cold War dream of a Europe of open borders and broad, shared identity has come under increasing question.”—Garth Greenwell, The New York Times Book Review

“[David Szalay] has an admirable fearlessness for swiftly entering invented fictional worlds . . . In canny, broad strokes, full of intelligently managed detail, each story funds its new fictional enterprise, as if he were calling out, each time, ‘Where do you want to go? Poland? Copenhagen? Málaga? Berlin? I can do them all. Let’s go’ . . . His book is also bracingly unsentimental about male desire and male failure . . . Intensely readable . . . After several hundred pages of great brilliance and brutal simplicity, here at last is a deeper picture of all that man is, or all that he might be.”—James Wood, The New Yorker

“These closely observed, untitled accounts are unnerving and compelling, and have a haunting cumulative effect . . . Though we know them each briefly, these men are so authentic—and, frequently, so hapless—that they earn our sympathy . . . In this remarkable book, Szalay pursues an essential truth, important to recognize in our globalizing times: The geographies change, yet the self remains. Whoever and however old a man is, he must face his life. And live it.”—San Francisco Chronicle

“An indelible portrait of contemporary male existence . . . [All That Man Is] defies categorization, refusing to be neatly defined as either story collection or novel, comedy or drama, resulting in a fictional endeavor that is productively unsettling and wholly unique. Through the sheer magnetism of each man he portrays, Szalay proves himself a deft storyteller of shrewd psychological intrigue.”—Harper's Bazaar

“Szalay is a sophisticated, well-travelled writer with a sharp eye for the self-deceived, the ambitious, and the maimed. His gift, as has been noted by many reviewers, is that he can dissect his characters but never lose respect for them. As blind or guilty, callow or brutal as they are, their creator finds their dignity. . . . [His] characters don’t expect transcendence in this world: rather they nose up against desires that work like distorting mirrors, ones that bend in reflection to questioning gazes. There are extraordinary moments, epiphanies, to use again an over-used term, that make real the condition that man is in.”—Commonweal Magazine

“All That Man Is reminds me of the late, great James Salter . . . Szalay is a talented stylist. Written in a spare, bracing present tense reminiscent of J. M. Coetzee, whose own cool, controlled prose style restrains the volatile emotions that underpin it, Szalay is able to describe even the most mundane situations with limpid elegance. The stories are filled with striking images and resonant detail. Szalay is a first-class noticer, a master of what the critic James Wood calls ‘thisness’—that is, the detail that seems absolutely true, that with its precision and seeming banality fastens a scene to the page and makes it breathe.”—The Rumpus

“A unique, challenging book that tells their stories from youngest to oldest, it is a fascinating and sometimes disturbing look at common experiences between different classes and what it means to be a man in the modern world.”—BookRiot

“Szalay does so much and so well that we come to view his snapshots of lives as brilliant, captivating dramas.”—The Star Tribune (Minneapolis)

“A 100-megawatt novel: intelligent, intricate, so very well made, the form perfectly fitting the content. When I reached the end, I turned straight back to the start to begin again.”—The Sunday Times (London)