Steps by Jerzy Kosinski

Jerzy Kosiński was an award-winning Polish-American novelist. His novel, Steps, was the 1969 winner of the National Book Awards. This novel is comprised of a series of loosely connected vignettes. The book is meant to be shocking and brought the author close to celebrity status after winning the award. Steps begins with the narrator going to a zoo to see an octopus that is slowly killing itself by consuming its own tentacles. The piece ends with the narrator discovering that a woman he’s picked up off the street is actually a man. While some of the vignettes are connected to each other, some are not, but all of them are marked by concrete prose and lucidity of the narrative. The book explores themes of horror, repression, alienation, isolation and anxiety.