Prose off: Story by Booker Prize winner David Szalay in The Paris Review put forward by raging classist/tote bag retailer Emily Stokes v. Fleming story

Wednesday 3/25/26

Ring the bell, it's prose off time! Ding ding ding!!! And in this corner...

...we have David Szalay. He was shortlisted for the Booker Prize--which is one of the biggest deals in the world in publishing, in case you don't know, like the Pulitzer, never mind that even rage-drunk (at the minimum) Mark Warren landed one of those, albeit not for fiction, like those geniuses Junot Diaz and Joshua Cohen--back in 2016, and won the Booker Prize for fiction in 2025.

He was deemed one of the best young novelists in the world by billionaire heiress Sigrid Rausing's Granta in 2013, and if you know anything about Sigrid from her assorted appearances in these pages, you know that she's totally sane and not evil and drunk out of her mind herself on ego and class infatuation, and to be endorsed by Sigrid...well, it says it all, doesn't it? Intellectually/artistically, it's akin to landing yourself a letter of recommendation for a prestigious ethics/morality school, were there such things, from a child molester.

Naturally, I'm awfully worried about how this prose off will go for me, especially using this thing I did this morning. I just wrote it! While writing all the other stuff I've written so far this morning. But I'm going to be brave for you. I just had a cup of hibiscus tea, so my heart is feeling strong. But as they say, prayers up! and thank you in advance.

Ready? This is from David Szalay's "Facades" in the spring 2026 issue of The Paris Review:

Toward the end of winter, Márton and Ashley fly out to Budapest. They’re staying at the Ritz-Carlton. They arrive on a Tuesday evening, and the following morning, they meet the agent at the property.

The agent’s name is Tibor.

The three of them are standing in what is now the central courtyard of the building. At the top it’s open to the sky, the visible square of which is a uniform gray.

“You see, we’d put a glass roof on it,” Márton says to the agent. “This would be the lobby.”

Márton takes a few paces across the damp concrete, largely stained green, that slopes down to a central drain. The building has been derelict for a long time. It was the subject of some kind of yearslong legal dispute, apparently.

“What do you think?” he asks Tibor, who has wandered off to where a piece of rusty metal hangs out of the crumbling wall.

The agent nods. “Sounds like a plan,” he says.

“We need to work out how many rooms we’d be able to fit in,” Márton tells him.

“Sure.”

“Ashley’s going to do some measurements.”

“Do you know what this was?” Tibor asks him. He means the rusty metal thing sticking out of the wall at about shoulder height⁠—a single horizontal bar a few meters long.

“No,” Márton says. 

“It was for carpets.” 

“Yeah?”

“You’d hang your carpet over it and then beat the dust out.”

“Okay,” Márton says.

“You’ll find one of these in most of the old courtyards of the city,” Tibor says, touching the rust-eaten bar.

The paunchy agent is probably about Márton’s own age, somewhere in his early fifties. He learned to sell property in Dublin. He lived there for years. That’s why his English sometimes has a weird Irish twist to it when he says things like “old courtyards.”

He and Márton speak mostly English with each other, only occasionally slipping into their own language.

They walk up the monumental stone stairs to the second floor, where Ashley gets to work with his laser measure, noting down  numbers on an old architectural plan.

While he does that, Márton and Tibor stand at a damaged balustrade, looking down onto the courtyard from a higher vantage.

“It’s hard to imagine that people lived here once,” Márton says. “The way it is now.”

“Mm,” Tibor agrees. He’s wearing a suit with an open-necked shirt and trainers, exhibiting a sort of informal formality that’s well suited to his role. He works for an international property agency, one that handles major assets like this derelict block of flats.

Márton, dressed less formally though more expensively, likes dealing with him. He’s one of those people you instinctively trust. He doesn’t seem to have any malice in him. One of his colleagues had shown Márton the property on the previous occasion he’d looked at it⁠—a more shifty and aggressive character.

They talk about what life must have been like when the building was first put up, in the late nineteenth century.

Servants, horse-drawn vehicles, uncomfortable clothes. 

That sort of stuff.

You're just telling us boring shit, man. As a boring man, this is to be expected, but I thought this was supposed to be brilliant writing? Masterful art? No? We got a Booker Prize winner here, right?

Again, it's not me hunting for the worst fiction I can find. I clicked on exactly one story today at The Paris Review's site, which is my preferred methodology often with these prose offs, because 1. These people sicken me and it sickens me to see their garbage writing, knowing the actual reasons why that garbage is where it is and 2. All you ever need to is click on anything by any of these people, because it's all the same level of garbage, so why draw out this part of the process of setting up a prose off any longer than you have to?

Nothing but across the board meaninglessness from these people. Clunk (at the level of the sentence) and junk.

Remember what we were saying about how none of these works are for reading? Whether they're stories, books. They're for trainspotting. People like these people want to trainspot, to scan, to eyeball rather than read, and see something like, Ritz-Carleton, because that's rich person shit, or pretend intellectual person shit as the case may be, but just so they can pat themselves on the back when the see something that they think of as coming from their world that makes them special, because the truth is, nothing else does. This doesn't either. But they try to have something, and this is that thing. Their classism.

Is Paris Review fiction supposed to suck, bore, and match with other fiction by other fiction writers whose work also sucks and bores? Is that the goal here?

If it is, kudos, because mission accomplished, right?

And yet, that may be the goal, but I'm pretty sure that's not what Emily "Can I Sell You a Tote Bag/I See Your Blood is Blue So How About Leaving Us Lots of Money When You Die" Stokes and these types of people want you think.

They want you to think that's brilliant. That here's a genius, and they are some very smart people themselves for knowing this and publishing the work of a genius.

How is that good? Can anyone answer that question? Does anyone have a legitimate answer that they'd care to affix their name to?

How can you look at that writing and think it's captivating? That it matters? That it's essential? That this is what humans need? That this changes you, compels you, inspires you, moves you?

It's just a boring, talentless, privileged (do I need to even inform you that here's yet another one of these people who went to an expensive prep school, and then on, in this case, to a school like Oxford?) guy telling you things.

This isn't a story. It's not fiction. It's sure as fuck not the art of fiction. It's just announcing crap. In unmemorable subject-verb sentences, one after another.

I don't know...shouldn't there be something at least a little bit interesting in the language? Do you think this language is interesting? Do you think writing this takes skill? Because I know you don't think that.

So do you then think someone who writes this way, who can't write any better, should have fiction in The Paris Review? Should they win Booker Prizes?

They're obviously not getting these things because of their writing. Do you think you couldn't write this well? Why? Do you think you're a moron who can't throw a few of the most basic sentences together?

I feel like you probably don't think that about yourself.

So let me ask you this: How come you're not in The Paris Review? Where's your Booker Prize? You can write this well, so if you wanted to, you should be able to get that stuff, right?

Oh, wait...you're suggesting that this is just some rigged up the ass country club bullshit? No!?

Ugh. You have shattered my illusions, robbed me of my innocence. Busted my maidenhood.

Do you believe that Emily Stokes, who is ultimately just a gilded tote bag retailer, chose that for publication because she believes its remarkable, or was it these...other things?

Don't you love these bigots? That is the word for them, right? Looks to be pretty evidentially the word.

Damn that's bad writing. You have no ability, sir. You're just getting hooked up by people as insincere, as gross, as mediocre--which is too generous a term--as you.

Let me ask you, people who aren't one of these people: Do you think if you wrote the above and showed it to someone you know, that they'd say, "Wow, this is brilliant, you should totally be a writer, you can probably dominate and win major awards?"

Can you even conceive of that happening?

Of course not.

I like how this guy doesn't even go through the motions of writing. He doesn't even bother to try! That's some impressive ass hubris. But he doesn't have to. It's like a piss take, really. You couldn't try less to write well. And it's not even hidden a tiny bit. Because he knows he'll be handed stuff regardless, so why bother?

That sort of stuff.

Thanks, chief! Mail it in! Mail it in! Mail it in! The crowd goes wild!

A man like this needs this system to be what it is, because if you actually had to have something that doesn't suck, he'd have no chance.

Good thing then, right?

Anyway, back to it. And in this corner we have...well, you know who we have. The infinitely better writer. Hi. How are we all doing this morning? Ready for this? Okay.

She put balls between legs without it seeming like she was toying with anyone. Made long passes through seams, placing the ball in the space where the receiver of the pass was about to be, but as though they had no idea until they arrived and discovered it was a good thing they showed up where and when they did.  

She ran without the ball along lines of sutures that were themselves far afield of anyone else’s perception or understanding of the larger, detail-dwarfing whole, putting herself in position to receive a misstruck kick or double deflection like it was a brilliantly planned and executed pass from inception to reception and now that she’d gotten what she’d come for she could be on the move again.

And sometimes, in rarer instances that she must have felt warranted it, qualifying each as a special occasion within the context of this game, and perhaps beyond it as well, she let the ball get a few feet further in front of her before making a stutter-step advance of intensely rhythmic precision, a dance of syncopated, on-the-beat, off-the-beat elegance and exactitude, both compact and wide, closed and inviting, inspired and practical, publicly hosted and personally joyous, well-timed and outside of time, drawing back her kicking foot and then bringing it to bear with what may or may not have been her full force on this lone sphere atop all this flat ground, the acreage of existence, the mid-mornings of sport, and booming it between bodies and over heads through the various stages of its trajectory as though she were keeping everyone honest, and something about the world, too.

I had stopped looking for myself against that high fence close to where these people were as if I might have caught my own eye and signaled with a wave for us to meeting the middle of the field where I’d pass on some words to my former self, or is it my same self, about…what, exactly? What is there to say? What isn’t there to say? What’s the difference?

Instead I watched the girl without shoes and socks as she ran, flowed, sped up, stopped on the spot, thinking to whichever of us I am, “Boom that ball!”, after it’d been a while between her rockets, and being especially pleased when she did just that in the seconds shortly after.

Isn't it interesting how each work of fiction from the Fleming guy is completely different from every one of his other works of fiction, and how each of the works of fiction by these people is exactly like all their other works of fiction?

Is it supposed to be like that? You're supposed to only be able to do the one thing, the same way...poorly?

My bad. I definitely have gotten it wrong. Like I said, just taking one here for the team, man.