David Szalay didn’t set out to write a novel about the so-called crisis in masculinity, but he doesn’t mind if you read “Flesh” that way.

“While I was writing the book, I tried not to think of it too much in terms of a broader sort of cultural discussion or a broader sort of landscape of representation,” he said in a recent video call from Vienna.

“To write a book as a deliberate attempt to participate on some level in a discussion like that might have taken the book away from a focus on … trying to write as honestly as I can about certain experiences and about experience.”

The Canadian-born author’s Booker Prize win last month prompted a slurry of think pieces about how “Flesh” fit into ongoing conversations about masculinity and male representation in a literary scene that has made a

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