Showing results by author "Nathan Englander" in All Categories

The title story, inspired by Raymond Carver’s masterpiece, is a provocative portrait of two marriages in which the Holocaust is played out as a devastating parlor game. In the outlandishly dark “Camp Sundown” vigilante justice is undertaken by a group of geriatric campers in a bucolic summer enclave. “Free Fruit for Young Widows” is a small, sharp study in evil, lovingly told by a father to a son. “Sister Hills” chronicles the history of Israel’s settlements from the eve of the Yom Kippur War through the present, a political fable constructed around the tale of two mothers who strike a terrible bargain to save a child.

Already sold in eight countries around the world, these nine energized, irreverent stories from Nathan Englander introduce an astonishing new talent.

Larry is the secular son in a family of Orthodox Brooklyn Jews. When his father dies, it’s his responsibility to recite the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, every day for 11 months. To the horror and dismay of his sister, Larry refuses - imperiling the fate of his father’s soul. To appease her, Larry hatches an ingenious if cynical plan, hiring a stranger through a website called kaddish.com to recite the prayer and shepherd his father’s soul safely to rest.

The award winning series of classic and contemporary fiction returns with a collection of darkly funny short stories by the likes of Stephen King, Neil Gaiman, Aimee Bender, A.M. Homes, Nathan Englander, Kim, Addonizio, and George Saunders. Readers include Anjelica Huston, Neil Gaiman, Michael Imperioli, Harris Yulin, Christina Pickles, Jefferson Mays, and Christine Ebersole.

A prisoner in a secret cell. The guard who has watched over him a dozen years. An American waitress in Paris. A young Palestinian man in Berlin who strikes up an odd friendship with a wealthy Canadian businessman. And The General, Israel's most controversial leader, who lies dying in a hospital, the only man who knows of the prisoner's existence.

From its unforgettable opening scene in the darkness of a forgotten cemetery in Buenos Aires, The Ministry of Special Cases casts a powerful spell. In a world turned upside down, where the past and the future, and the nature of truth itself, all take shape according to a corrupt government's whims, one man, one spectacularly hopeless man, fights to overcome his history and his name - and, if for only once in his life, to put things right.

Pulitzer finalist and best-selling author Nathan Englander will be joined by author Mira Jacob ( The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing) to discuss his new, "many-splendored" ( The New York Times) novel, Dinner at the Center of the Earth, a powerful, riveting story exploring the Israel-Palestine conflict through the lives of a prisoner in a secret cell and the soldier who watched over him for a dozen years.

A Jewish man works as a department-store Santa in this comic tale, a short story from Nathan Englander's collection For the Relief of Unbearable Urges.

In this short story from Nathan Englander's collection For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, an Orthodox Jewish wife is abandoned and made miserable because her husband will not consent to a religious divorce.

In this short story from Nathan Englander's collection For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, a mental patient tries to get help from a rabbi to smooth over family problems his manic episodes cause.

In this short story from Nathan Englander's collection For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, a young man living in Jerusalem witnesses the effects of terrorist bombings on the citizens' everyday lives.

In this short story from Nathan Englander's collection For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, a clerical error lands earnest, unpublished Pinchas Pelovits in prison with 26 other writers.

In this short story from Nathan Englander's collection For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, an aging wigmaker becomes, for a single moment, beautiful.

In this short story from Nathan Englander's collection For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, a Protestant, after a religious awakening in the back of a New York taxi, realizes he has a Jewish soul.

In this short story from Nathan Englander's collection For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, a group of World War II-era Hasids, mistakenly put on a circus train instead of a transport to a death camp, are assumed to be acrobats. They perform a clumsy act, which their Nazi audience applauds as a parody of "Jewish ballet".

In Englander's amazingly taut and ambitious "The Twenty-seventh Man," a clerical error lands earnest, unpublished Pinchas Pelovits in prison with twenty-six writers slated for execution at Stalin's command, and in the grip of torture Pinchas composes a mini-masterpiece, which he recites in one glorious moment before author and audience are simultaneously annihilated. In "The Gilgul of Park Avenue," a Protestant has a religious awakening in the back of a New York taxi.