From the up-and-coming young American writer who has contributed to McSweeney's and written for the New Yorker comes a masterful collection of short stories that has already received rave reviews from many of the most prominent writers working today. Some of the stories are comic masterpieces, some embody as dark a vision of the universe as you are likely to encounter, and all of them showcase a writer grappling with the great questions of modern life.
Read a story from the collection on The New Yorker website.
Reviews
The Financial Times
Pankaj Mishra
“At home in many idioms, Englander unerringly finds the right one for each of his stories, and his laconic prose facilitates quick shifts of scene, emphasis and sympathy … This preference for miniature polyphony is not evasiveness. Englander, like all genuinely comic writers, is profoundly serious – and moral. He seems particularly obsessed with the pathologies of violence: how quickly the oppressed can turn into oppressors.”
27/01/2012
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The Independent on Sunday
Suzi Feay
“Nathan Englander may take his title from Raymond Carver, but in the opening story it's a family joke that twists into something grimmer. "What we talk about" is usually the Holocaust, the psychic wound that haunts virtually all these stories. And yet this is far from a sombre book.”
29/01/2012
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The Sunday Times
Robert MacFarlane
“The obstacles to opening this book are considerable: you have to hack through the enjungling praise, then avoid slipping on the intertextual smarm of the title. But if you make it that far, the rewards are considerable. Englander has written a fine collection, as intricately patterned across its length as a novel, though its stories are set in various decades and locations ... cautious, crafted, crafty stories, which catch you again and again off guard.”
22/01/2012
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The Literary Review
Thomas Marks
“Englander has a fine capacity for writing both unflinchingly and idiosyncratically about these difficult subjects, most notably in the title story ... There’s an impressive range of tone in this collection, its East Coast wisecracks offset by moving voyages into Jewish pasts.”
01/02/2012
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The Guardian
James Lasdun
“Nathan Englander's acclaimed first collection of stories, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges (1999), was a serio-comic take on the clash of flesh and spirit, viewed mostly through the prism of an Orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn … It was a terrific book, but a notably apolitical one ... Thirteen years on, with an intifada and the 9/11 attacks having occurred in the interim, Englander returns to the short-story form, and one approaches his new collection with great curiosity. Will this gifted writer have found a way of adapting the form to accommodate a wider perspective on his subject? The answer is emphatically yes. ”
01/02/2012
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The Daily Telegraph
Anthony Cummins
“You wouldn’t call Nathan Englander prolific – one novel and 17 short stories since 1999 – but he’s the sort of writer who makes you think “prolific” is nothing: better, surely, to be good, and these zingy, dialogue-driven tales are certainly that. Their theme – postwar Jewishness as black comedy – isn’t exactly unfamiliar, but Englander has a knack for a fresh scenario, and his light touch is well suited to dark subjects.”
03/02/2012
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The New Statesman
Sophie Elmhirst
“Englander is too good a writer to have a "schtick" but if he did, this would be it: setting up a scene, coddling the reader with whimsical anecdote and a light, breezy tone, and then coolly breaking it all apart. There is never anything as clumsy as a twist in Englander's stories - just a gradual, deft dismantling of what you thought you knew, or could rely on.”
12/02/2012
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The Daily Telegraph
Tim Martin
“With its titular hi-there to Raymond Carver and its jacket jammed with encomia from the A-list of American letters — Chabon, Egan, Eggers, Franzen, Foer et al — it’s slightly surprising that Nathan Englander’s third book is so free from self-congratulation. Light on technical and formal fireworks, heavy on savoury comedy and possessed of a somehow uncontemporary moral gravity, What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank is instead a short story collection of atypical seriousness and grip.”
28/03/2012
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The London Review of Books
Christian Lorentzen
“When he isn’t shrink-wrapping history, Englander’s crude literary appropriations tend to spotlight the flimsiness of his plotting and the cautious plodding of his prose. ”
22/03/2012
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