What if Kafka and O. Henry hung out at a cafe in Tel Aviv? Keret crafts tiny jewel-box stories about contemporary life in Israel. In one, a husband discovers his wife has glued herself to the ceiling; in another a man stops time to get a girl to fall in love with him. These are economical stories -- most top out at 3 pages – with characters that are vulnerable and fragile one moment, funny and surreal the next. - Michele Siegel

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Product Description

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #97575 in Books
• Published on: 2008-04-15
• Released on: 2008-04-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 192 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Advocates of flash fiction contend you can say a lot with a little. Unfortunately, you can also say a little with a little. Israeli writer Keret (The Nimrod Flipout) confirms both with this hodgepodge of 46 sketches, culled from his first collection. There are whimsical tales like Nothing, about a woman who loved a man who was made of nothing because this love would never betray her, and Freeze! about a guy who can stop the world and uses the power to score with hot girls. Despite an appealing, comic voice, many of these pieces feel insubstantial and leave the reader indifferent. Nevertheless, a haunting theme arises as stories featuring violence accumulate: Not Human Beings, in which an Israeli soldier is beaten by fellow officers when he objects to the cruel treatment of an old Arab man, screams in the face of bloodshed, whereas the irritation of the father in A Bet, when TV news reports on an Arab sentenced to death preempts an episode of Moonlighting, suggests how violence has been normalized. Keret demonstrates how the same short form that produces ineffective trifles can also create moments of startling power. (Apr.)
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Review

"Keret is a brilliant writer, unlike anyone I've read. He is the voice of the next generation."—Salman Rushdie

“Keret may be the most important writer working in Israel right now; certainly he is the closest observer of its post-intifada, post-Oslo spiritual condition. And astonishingly, he is also the Israeli writer closest to the literary tradition of pre-Israel, pre- Holocaust European Jewry . . . Kafka said that literature should be an ax to break the frozen sea within us. Keret is a writer wailing at the ice with a Wiffle ball bat.” —Stephen Marche, The Forward

“Short, strange, funny, deceptively casual in tone and affect, stories that sound like a joke but aren’t—Etgar Keret is a writer to be taken seriously.” —Yann Martell “Keret can do more with six . . . paragraphs than most writers can with 600 pages.” —Kyle Smith, People

About the Author
Etgar Keret was born in Tel Aviv in 1967. His stories have been featured on This American Life and Selected Shorts. As screenwriters/ directors, he and his wife, Shira Geffen, won the 2007 Palme d’Or for Best Debut Feature (Jellyfish) at the Cannes Film Festival.