Tag Archives: Anthology

May 20, 2013 · 10:02 am

I Am an Executioner: Love Stories by Rajesh Parameswaran

I Am an ExecutionerTo put a word so violent as Executioner next to a muzak-soundtrack-inducing subtitle like Love Stories, on a cover sporting a cutesy, heart-shaped tiger’s tail is exactly the sort of unsettling experience you can expect from Rajesh Parameswaran’s uniquely original debut story collection.

Animals take control of their narratives in a third of the nine stories here: in “The Infamous Bengal Ming,” a tiger newly smitten with his zookeeper unintentionally becomes a gory killer than a gentle lover; in “Elephants in Captivity (Part One),” a captive pachyderm’s hurriedly penned (trunked?) memoir is presented in translation from its original “Englaphant,” with more footnoted annotations than original text; in “On the Banks of Table River (Planet Lucina, Andromeda Galaxy, AD 2319),” the vicious mating rituals of oversized insects with each other, as well as humans, are revealed in churning detail.

While love among different species might be less than compatible, cavorting with one’s own kind is also no guarantee of ‘happily ever after.’ In the eponymous “I Am an Executioner,” the titular protagonist works desperately to start a relationship with his shocked new wife In “Demons,” a wife’s deathly wish towards her overbearing husband shockingly comes true – and then what is she to do? In “Narrative of an Agent 97-4702,” spouses can only share lives of half-truths and repeated deceptions.

When love morphs into power-play, tragedy inevitably ensues, from a failing computer salesman posing as a medical doctor in “The Strange Career of Dr. Raju Gopalarajan,” to a railway employee marrying up in “Four Rajeshes,” to a production designer’s desire to claim directorial control in “Bibhutibhushan Mallik’s Final Storyboard.”

Parameswaran’s imagination makes startling twists and manages to achieve unanticipated feats of bizarre fancy. A little shock to our jaded systems can only be a good thing – uncomfortable laughter, sudden squeamishness, unrestrained gasps all included!

Readers: Adult

Published: 2012

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April 11, 2013 · 5:19 pm

Between the Assassinations by Aravind Adiga

Between the AssassinationsFor fans of Aravind Adiga‘s unforgettable 2008 Booker Prized first novel, The White Tiger, who were perhaps not as enthralled with his 2011 follow-up, Last Man in Tower, might I suggest you look backward a few more years to his very first book? Introduced to eager readers just after Adiga’s Booker win, Between the Assassinations was actually written before Tiger in spite of getting to the presses a little later.

With intriguing cleverness, Assassinations is an interlinked short story collection, presented as something like a tourist guide, introduced with a town map and a note, “Arriving in Kittur.” Located between Goa and Calicut on India’s southwestern coast, the three months following the monsoon season which ends in September “are the best time to visit Kittur. Given the town’s richness of history and scenic beauty, and diversity of religion, race, and language, a minimum stay of a week is recommended,” the guide advises.

That seven-day set-up which Adiga used with such success in The White Tiger, works equally well here. Presented as a ‘what-to-do’ schedule during seven days and nights in Kittur, Adiga embellishes each suggested go-to location with a related narrative. On arriving the first day into the railway station, Adiga offers the story of a young Muslim boy who initially works in a nearby “tea-and-samosa place” and moves from job to job – for awhile counting all the incoming and outgoing trains for a seemingly fancy stranger – unsure of his coming future.

On Day Two, you might go to Lighthouse Hill and see what happens when a bookseller who’s already been arrested 21 times for offering illegally photocopied books begins to sell Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses. In the evening, you might visit the Market and Maidan, and meet Keshava who came from a small village two years ago, only to learn how disposable human life can be in a big city. On Day Four, Umbrella Street – Kittur’s commercial center – will introduce you to Chenayya who is not so young, who needs all his energy to deliver furniture throughout the city. On Day Five while you stroll by the Cathedral of Our Lady of Valencia, you might meet George who is convinced a “princess” will save him from a life of drudgery. On Day Seven at the Salt Market Village, perhaps you’ll see Murali, who at 55, might be coming to the realization that he has wasted his privileged life for an uncompromising cause when what he really longs for is a family of his own.

Populating streets, buildings, and neighborhoods with an array of characters with multiple stories – hopeful and bittersweet both – Adiga presents a multi-dimensional view of a bustling town on the verge of drastic change, caught at the crossroads of inescapable backgrounds and fresh new ideas. If you choose to visit Kittur aurally, rest assured that narrator Harsh Nayyar literally breathes life into Adiga’s workers and dreamers, politicians and escapists, students and fathers. Go ahead, take the trip – travel couldn’t be easier: by book or by iPod, Kittur awaits.

Readers: Adult

Published: 2009

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March 17, 2013 · 10:33 am

Lost in the City: Stories by Edward P. Jones

Lost in the CitySo first off, I read backwards (see yesterday’s post) … which seemed to have worked out okay, but I still wish I could time travel back to read in the ‘correct’ order: this, Lost in the City, first, THEN All Aunt Hagar’s Children. If you haven’t read either, take my advice, start here first. Also, if you choose to stick Lost in the ears, rest assured that a talented ensemble of multiple narrators take turns bringing Edward P. Jones’ tales of the capital city to life.

MacArthur “Genius” Jones began his lauded literary career with these 14 stories, all set in Washington, DC, in which he captures the every day, what might be called ordinary, lives of African American residents through the decades of the 20th century. Some are native DC-born, while others are transplants who have come north seeking, if not rebirth, then at least improved opportunities.

A young girl raises pigeons on her roof in the aptly named “The Girl Who Raised Pigeons,” a wayward young man gets and keeps a job at “The Store” run by an initially acerbic owner, a highly successful woman who has just received news of her mother’s death climbs into a cab hoping to get “Lost in the City,” and an aging woman agrees to record her life’s remembrances on a series of cassette tapes in “Marie.”

Certainly, Lost stands magnificently on its own. But  – and what a ‘but’! – here’s the gawwww-inducing kicker: the 14 stories here line up with All Aunt Hagar‘s 14 stories, written 14 years apart. What do I mean by line-up? Here’s an example: story #2 here, “The First Day,” and story #2 in All, “Spanish in the Morning,” are both about a young girl’s first day of school. Be assured, these are not rewrites of each other, but expertly aligned companion pieces. If literature has but seven basic plots (others insist on less, still others more), then they’re represented multiple times throughout Jones’ stories in both collections, albeit with resonance and grace, each uniquely presented beyond fleeting moments of familiarity.

So here’s a partial key – how horrible would I be if I spoiled all your ‘aha’-moments?! If you’re like me and don’t want to know anything more, then stop right here … and go get both books already. If you need just a few hints, try this: #4s’ Caesar; #8s’ Georgia and the daughter “who would have earned more than all her ancestors put together”; #11s’ blind woman. Good start for you? Now go discover the rest … your own ‘gawwww’ will start soon enough!

Readers: Adult

Published: 1992

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March 16, 2013 · 10:33 am

All Aunt Hagar’s Children: Stories by Edward P. Jones

Aunt Hagar's ChildrenEdward P. Jones takes up little space on library shelves. Over the last 20+ years, he’s published three books: two story collections and a single novel. Proving the adage ‘quality over quantity,’ Jones’ awards are considerably more extensive, from the PEN/Hemingway Award for his first title, to the Pulitzer, National Book Critics Circle Award, and IMPAC Dublin Award for his second, and his PEN/Faulkner finalist nod for this, his latest. In between, Jones also earned a coveted MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship in 2004.

In a random moment of browsing through my overflowing shelves, I opened up All Aunt Hagar’s Children; once I started, of course, I kept going. Fourteen stories later (some of them stuck in ears, impeccably read by actor James Peter Francis), here I am … only to realize that I should have read Jones’ 1992 debut, Lost in the City, first because the two titles are actually companions to each other. Published 14 years apart, both collections contain 14 stories set in Jones’ home city of Washington, DC, with each story correspondingly connected to a story in the other book – that is, the first story in Lost and the first in All are a matching pair, just as Lost‘s 14th and All’s 14th are linked. Here’s hoping I can make the connections backwards.

A marriage begins to fall apart “In the Blink of God’s Eye” with the discovery of an abandoned baby tied up in the trees, while a family flounders because of illness, distance, and even religion in “Resurrecting Methusalah.” A single gesture – misinterpreted – destroys the last of an ex-prisoner’s already strained faith in his family in “Old Boys, Old Girls,” and a Korean veteran returns home in the titular “All Aunt Hagar’s Children” and must solve the murder of longtime family friend’s errant son.

In “Root Worker,” a young doctor takes her mother back to North Carolina in search of a local healer to exorcise the older’s woman’s witches. In “Common Law,” a once independent woman succumbs to the charms, and then to violence, at the whim of a man she can’t seem to let go. A woman inexplicably loses her sight in ”Blindsided,” while an elderly widower loses virtually everything in “A Rich Man.” In “Tapestry,” the final story – and my personal favorite – the not-lived life of a just-married young woman is interrupted by the life she’s just begun.

Jones, thankfully, is not a superficially tidy writer: his stories are not about artificial assurances, predictable narratives, easy endings. Each story is a microcosm to ponder and process; collected together, they weave together a diverse, dynamic tapestry – to borrow the final story’s title – of every day, seemingly ordinary African American life through a quickly evolving, unexpectedly changing 20th-century Washington, DC.

As rewarding as All proves to be, I admit I’m looking forward to getting Lost, already convinced I’m about to experience even greater enhancement and enrichment. I’ve just started Lost … stay tuned – I’ll be back in 14 stories.

Readers: Adult

Published: 2006

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March 2, 2013 · 9:11 am

Delicate Edible Birds and Other Stories by Lauren Groff

Delicate Edible BirdsIf the name Lauren Groff sounds familiar, that might be because her latest title, Arcadia, appears on oh-so-many Best-of-2012 lists. I admit I haven’t yet read Arcadia (it’s high in my ‘must-read’ pile), but if I have the option among an author’s titles, short stories are usually my first choice.

Just as I clicked ‘on’ knowing nothing more than the lauded reputation associated with Groff’s name, I hope not to dampen anyone else’s eyebrow-raising, shudder-inducing surprise factor. That means you might want to stop here, or you’ll have to risk even the bare minimum being too much …

In “Lucky Chow Fun,” the only girl swimmer on the high school team watches as the discovery of a human trafficking operation destroys the idyllic haze that protected her small town. Swimming transforms the legendary real-life 12th-century lovers, Abelard and Heloise, into 20th-century “L. DeBard and Aliette,” an Olympian and his teenaged wheelchair-bound protegé. In ”Majorette,” the oldest daughter in a dysfunctional family finally finds comfort, stability, and lasting happiness. Dysfunction ceaselessly controls the relationship between two intimate friends in ”Blythe.” Always maintaining distance, the ex-pat wives bear witness to the slow destruction of ”The Wife of the Dictator.”

A professional storyteller becomes the wife of a childhood friend in “Watershed,” only to have her narrative cut short. In ”Sir Fleeting,” a Midwestern farm girl reinvents her own personal narrative to eventually match, even surpass, that of the glamorous playboy who appears in and out of her life. In ”Fugue” – so aptly named as the most intricate story in the collection – disintegrating relationships overlap and overpower. And, in ”Delicate Edible Birds,” again, the lone woman among men, this time in a pack of war correspondents during World War II, falls prey to inhumanity.

All nine stories later, I know I chose remarkably well! [Stuck in the ears – narrated by Susan Eriksen who's amply capable of multiple nuanced voices – the collection makes for mesmerizing running/walking/laundry-folding company; you'll just keep going in order to listen!] From absolving to traitorous, from desperate to destructive, each story is a complete narrative to absorb, appreciate, and ultimately admire. Now, Arcadia, here I come!

Readers: Adult

Published: 2009

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February 13, 2013 · 9:19 am

Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales by Yoko Ogawa, translated by Stephen Snyder

RevengeWhat are the chances …?? So having just finished Hikikomori and the Rental Sister – an absolutely phenomenal read you should not miss! – I opened to the first story in Yoko Ogawa’s latest Stateside collection to find another parent mourning a young dead son. Talk about eerie and creepy, as if some darker power is directing my book choices (and more?). And then – and then (!) – not quite 2/3 of the way through Revenge, another freaky déjà-vu repeat: a lovers’ scene with a haircut on the balcony. I keep thinking: just what are the chances??

Some (most?) of you will be glad to know, that goosebumpy chill will stay with you all the way through to the final page and beyond (my fingers are getting cold just typing!).

Okay, so you’ve got 11 “dark tales” here. They’re interrelated, but in quite an ingenious way as to keep you focused (on alert? on edge?) from story to story. And yes, most definitely, these need to be read in order to get the full effect. No sloppy skipping allowed.

In the shudder-inducing opening story, “Afternoon at the Bakery,” a mother marks what would have been her late 6-year-old’s 18th birthday by buying strawberry shortcake; that “strawberry cake covered in a thick layer of whipped cream” reappears in the next story, “Fruit Juice,” about a schoolgirl who takes along a classmate to have a fancy lunch with her estranged, powerful, famous father. At story’s end, “Fruit Juice” highlights “enormous heaps of kiwis” … kiwis that just might have come from the fruit trees – mostly kiwis – that open the next story, “Old Mrs. J.”

From tale to tale, details carry over – beginning with something minor like pieces of fruit, to whole paragraphs transcribed from one story (“Old Mrs. J” again) into another in a very, very different context (the final tale, “Poison Plants,” about the relationship between a wealthy widow and an aspiring musician). The spooky particulars range from five-fingered carrots to murder, from a mis-placed heart to custom bags, from a dead hamster to a pet Bengal tiger, proven-to-be-used instruments of torture to a dead writer, all ending pretty much where it started – a curled up corpse in an abandoned refrigerator! And you’re thinking, ‘how did she dooooo that?’!!!

You must, of course, read the collection in full to make all the connections … your hairs will just continue to stand on end as you piece together the multi-layers. I just noticed my fingertips are turning purple-ish blue at the ends … proof indeed of a frightfully successful Revenge.

Tidbit: In case you can’t get enough of Yoko Ogawa, check out The Housekeeper and the Professor, which appears as one of my “Absolute Favorites” on BookDragon. Others also had high praise for Hotel Iris (shortlisted for the 2010 Man Asian Literary Prize, for example), but me, definitely not so much (reviewed for San Francisco Chronicle).

Readers: Adult

Published: 2013 (United States)

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January 4, 2013 · 10:19 am

This Is How You Lose Her by Junot Díaz

This Is How You Lose HerThus far, mega-award winning Junot Díaz (also recently bestowed the “Genius” moniker by the MacArthur Foundation) hasn’t written a book without his sort-of autobiographical stand-in Yunior de las Casas. Díaz’s 1996 fiction debut, Drown, introduced Yunior through interlinked short stories; a decade-plus later, Díaz turned over full narrative control to his pseudo-alter-ego in his 2008 Pulitzer Prize-winner, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

Yunior stars again in Díaz’s latest award-studded title which, if you choose to stick in your ears, you get the added experience of Díaz’s own narration. Both Drown and Oscar are superbly narrated by Johnathan Davis; here, the switch to Díaz is both disturbing (I know this is fiction, but all that first-person confession seems suddenly heavier) and rewarding (who doesn’t want to hear an author read his/her own writing … uh, except for maybe Michael Ondaatje’s surprisingly disappointing performance of his – also filled with autobiographical overlaps – The Cat’s Table).

Given the title (not to mention the endless fawning media attention), This is not a collection of lovey-dovey happy-endings. Of the nine stories, eight belong to Yunior who has an uncontrollable problem with fidelity. “I’m not a bad guy,” the first story – ”The Sun, the Moon, the Stars” – opens, “I’m like everyone else: weak, full of mistakes, but basically good.” His cheated-on girlfriend disagrees: “She considers me a typical Dominican man: a sucio, an a**hole.” Having witnessed his father’s and brother’s wandering ways, Yunior thought he could be otherwise: “You had hoped the gene missed you, skipped a generation, but clearly you were kidding yourself,” he admits in “Miss Lora.” By the final story, “The Cheater’s Guide to Love,” Yunior’s sucio red-letter badge threatens permanence.

Half of Yunior’s eight stories expand his immigrant childhood into searching teenagerhood: the family’s not-so-warm New Jersey reunion with a cold, controlling father in “Invierno”; his brother Rafa’s teenage, testosterone-charged exploits in “Nilda”; Rafa’s leukemia with the neverending complications of his too-active love life in “The Pura Principle”; and Yunior’s own cheating-on-his-high-school-girlfriend extracurricular relationship with an older woman in “Miss Lora.” Yunior’s college and young adult experiences get confessionally aired in “Alma,” “Flaca,” and “The Sun, the Moon, the Stars,” then jumps ahead to Yunior as an almost-middle-aged Harvard professor who, in the novella-length “The Cheater’s Guide to Love,” suffers many wrenching lonely years after his fiancée discovers his staggering, well-documented, on-the-side record and (no surprise) leaves him.

While Yunior commands the spotlight – the majority of the women here are temporary diversions, even the pined-for fiancée – at least two women demand lasting attention: Yunior’s mother who is neglected, oppressed, abandoned, and finally liberated with a Spanglish coven regularly available for prayer and gossip; and Yasmin, the protagonist in the single story that doesn’t belong to Yunior, “Otravida, Otravez,” who is a Dominican immigrant whose lover has a letter-writing wife back in the DR.

Beyond the repetitively bad behavior in every story, Díaz imbues each cheating tale with layered depth, including challenges of immigration and assimilation, absent and abusive parents, isolation, socioeconomic barriers, gender gaps, and racial divides. Indeed, as Yunior proclaims, he’s “not a bad guy”; he’s just a horrible lover, but he can be a caring friend and – thanks to that ex who compiled his exploits into “the Doomsday Book” and mailed it to him with a note, “… for your next book“ – he turns out to be quite the provocative storyteller.

Readers: Adult

Published: 2012

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December 24, 2012 · 10:10 am

Astray by Emma Donoghue

Maybe it’s the craziness of the season, but I’ve really been appreciating short story collections. This latest title from Emma Donoghue – the author of the phenomenal Room – is an intriguingly composed compilation: Donoghue presents a story introduced with a specific city and year, then gives the ‘ripped-from-the-headlines’ historical background that both explains and enhances her fictionalized narrative. Each is part of a centuries-old immigration journey, grouped together in three sections: “Departures,” “In Transit,” and “Arrivals and Aftermaths,” and in the final ”Afterword,” Donoghue – herself Irish-born, British PhDed, currently Canada-domiciled – explains “why, on and off, for the last decade and a half, I’ve been writing stories about travels to, within, and occasionally from the United States and Canada.” [If you choose the audible version, you'll get a full cast of effective narrators, but the best reward comes at the end when you get to hear Donoghue herself read the "Afterword" – that leftover lilt is just soooo inviting.]

Like Donoghue who has “gone stray, stepped off some invisible track [she] was meant to follow,” her characters begin in one place and are driven out, run away, move to, or search out somewhere else. In “Man and Boy,” two “self-made prodigies” are willing to accept “[w]hatever Barnum offers” – yes, as in P.T. – and prepare to sail from London in 1882 across the Atlantic toward waiting audiences. A young woman living in 1854 London in dire circumstances in “Onward” finds a surprising benefactor (I hope you’ll be as tickled as I was to learn his identity!) who offers the possibility of a reinvented life in the new world. In “Last Supper at Brown’s,” a slave and his missus flee 1864 Texas, leaving the master “facedown in the okra” (not my favorite veggie, either!).

In “Counting the Days,” plans for reunion between a waiting husband in Canada and his Irish wife and young children are tragically thwarted. A lawless woman of the Wild West captures a wayward prospector, and acting as her own “judge and jury,” decides to return him to his family with a few adventures along the way in “The Long Way Home.” In “The Gift,” a destitute new mother gives up her daughter in 1877 and spends the rest of her life trying to reclaim her. The private lives of a 1639 Cape Cod community are transgressively revealed, then recanted in “The Lost Seed.” And, in my personal favorite, “Daddy’s Girl,” a young woman learns the true identity of her father only upon his death.

Harnessing her own searching spirit, Donoghue ventures through centuries and continents, across oceans and cultures, to present a unique collection of peripatetic characters, each ready to confront, challenge, or flee what life presents next. Be assured: Going rogue never read this good.

Readers: Adult

Published: 2012

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December 23, 2012 · 10:05 am

Distant View of a Minaret by Alifa Rifaat, translated by Denys Johnson-Davis

Given the monumental (continuous) changes post-Arab Spring, my recent (ongoing) search for women’s voices before and after led me to an unusual writer who defies many expectations of what it means to be internationally literary: Alifa Rifaat lives and works in a traditional Egyptian Muslim society (this collection was first published in English translation almost three decades ago), she does not have a university education (her family married her off instead), she speaks a single language which means her reading is restricted to literature available only in Arabic, and the only time she has left her provincial Egyptian life is for religious pilgrimages to Mecca and Medina.

“At first consideration this would appear an uncompromising background for a writer of fiction,” notes her translator Denys Johnson-Davies (the notable nonagenarian and revered translator of Nobel-ist Naguib Mahfouz, Mahmud Darwish, Tayed Salih, and many more), “yet it is these very limitations that have imposed upon her writing its freshness and actuality. Most of her stories express, implicitly rather than explicitly, a revolt against many of the norms and attitudes, particularly those related to woman and her place in society.” Rifaat’s protests are less political than they are just simply human: men should behave kindly towards women – “as enjoined by the Qur’an” – and when they don’t, women turn to “contempt and rebellion.”

In the titular “Distant View of a Minaret,” a woman long denied fulfillment in marriage surprises herself by calmly pouring herself a cup of coffee immediately after her husband’s death. In “An Incident in the Ghobashi Household,” a woman figures out to save her daughter and therefore her family. In “Badriyya and Her Husband,” a lonely wife whose husband returns from prison, is proverbially “the last to know” but she finally contemplates how she will “find the strength not to open the door to him.” In “My World of the Unknown,” a woman embarks on a mysterious affair that may or may not be real, but more importantly provides her great joy and pleasure. In “The Flat on Nakshabandi Street,” an elderly maiden aunt who lives with her bachelor nephew watches life go by (and plots her daily machinations) from her window seat overlooking the street below.

The majority of Rifaat’s 15 short stories here underline how difficult basic consideration between the sexes seems to be. In her immediate world tightly circumscribed by traditional, religious, and societal expectations, a sense of resigned regret undeniably looms, but lest you dismiss the Rifaat’s writing as bleak and disheartening, be assured that many of the women here find their own ways of surviving, and even thriving.

Tidbit: What a surprise to find the eminent Denys Johnson-Davis on BookDragon (!) as the author of a children’s book, Goha the Wise Fool. Clearly I don’t even know my own content, but Johnson-Davis’ creativity sure is prodigious!

Readers: Adult

Published: 1983, 1985 (United Kingdom), 1987 (United States)

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December 20, 2012 · 10:11 am

Suddenly, a Knock on the Door by Etgar Keret, translated by Miriam Shlesinger, Sondra Silverston, and Nathan Englander

Suddenly, a Knock on the DoorIn spite of quite the impressive creative output including on the page (books, graphic novels, articles) and on celluloid (as both writer and director), I discovered Etgar Keret because of a house – the narrowest house (four feet at its widest!) in the world, wedged in between an apartment building and a postwar co-op in what was once the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw. When the architect, Jakub Szczęsny, imagined the perfect occupant for such a limited space, he thought of Keret because of his very short stories (which marked him as “someone accustomed to working within tight parameters”), as well as his Jewish Polish connections. You can read that house story here, and then discover 35 Keret stories (in less than 200 pages!) in this, his latest collection.

If Door is any indication, Keret’s writing surely defies easy categorization. Robbie finds a hole in the ground in which he can meet the incarnations of his many lies. Orit has to identify the body of a stranger who happens to be her husband even though she’s not married. Miron spends his mornings in a café meeting random people who mistake him for someone else. Ella unzips one lover to find another inside. A black man, a white woman, and a yellow priest confront a silvery, disabled God. Oshri the insurance salesman didn’t have any of his own when a man fell on his head. Ari’s girlfriend only sleeps with men named Ari.

Based on that 1/5 sampling of the collection, words like quirky, zany, wacky, might suffice. But then Keret will surprise you with wrenching: a man commits suicide over unrequited love; a newly widowed woman would rather open her restaurant to be with strangers than mourn alone. He offers even a few glimpses of the almost-mundane: a father who gives in to his willful young son; a woman who plans her husband’s 50th birthday surprise party for which only three near-strangers show up. And then there’s the personal favorite: a documentary filmmaker collecting answers about a talking goldfish which grants three wishes gets inadvertently murdered by a Russian immigrant whose  … uh … talking goldfish convinces him to make a final wish.

To read is to believe, even that which your brain might deem impossible. Keret offers quite the mind-boggling, head-scratching, heart-cracking literary trip, provided in convenient segments just right for our overstimulated, deficit-ed attention spans. Go ahead, answer that knock … let your unexpected journey begin.

Tidbit: Ironically enough, I did not stick Keret’s Door in my ears. I think I really missed something: the stories are read “by an all-star cast” including Ira Glass, Willem Dafoe, Michael Chabon, Nicole Krauss, and Nathan Englander (who also translated some of the stories!)! WOWOWOW! You can currently tune in to a few of the recordings on the homepage of Keret’s website. No clue how long those links will be available, so take advantage now!

Tidbit2: Talk about timing! This came through on my Twitter feed this morning – a five-foot wide house in Manhattan known as the “Spite House,” the story of which could even be a Keret creation!

Readers: Adult

Published: 2012 (United States)

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