The Palace Thief - Ethan Canin

The Palace Thief is a collection of four short stories - one of which was made into a pretty good movie I saw back in 2002 called The Emperor's Club, starring Kevin Kline and Emilie Hirsch. Canin's collection was the Stanford Book Salon's choice for the month of September, and something I probably wouldn't have known to pick up on my own. The basic theme running through the stories is that "Character is Destiny." Each of the stories presents a narrator or main character who is stumbling through life, trying to make sense and good choices - but is prevented from doing so because of his character, or the character of others. My appreciation for short stories has grown considerably in the past couple years, and I found three of the four in this collection quite intriguing - "The Accountant" and "Batorsag and Szerelem" for their complicated narrators, and "The Palace Thief" for overall entertainment (I wasn't a huge fan of "City of Broken Hearts" about a divorced man trying to get back on the dating wagon).