The Palace Thief

Ethan Canin is an American novelist and short story writer, born in 1960. He currently holds the F. Wendell Miller Professorship of English at his alma mater, the University of Iowa, as a member of its Writers’ Workshop faculty. Canin’s third book, The Palace Thief (1994), is a collection of short stories, which won the California Book Award in the year of its publication. Some of the stories were also published in illustrious literary journals; for example, the titular story “The Palace Thief” featured in Issue 128 of The Paris Review in 1993, while “Batorsag and Szerelem” was in the October 1993 issue of Granta magazine.

Plot Summary

The Palace Thief is composed of four short stories. While the stories are coherent separately, they are bound together in the collection by the Ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus’ theory that character is destiny. In all four stories, the protagonists’ specific dispositions influence their actions and subsequent events, rather than being taken in by the plot.

In the first story, “The Accountant,” a middle-aged narrator with a quintessential business degree and a long-time position at a successful company becomes entranced with the success of a childhood friend, whom he remembers as reckless and unstable.