Search results for ""author nathan englander""

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 eleven months. To the horror and dismay of his sister, Larry refuses - imperilling 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. This is Nathan Englander's freshest and funniest work to date - a satire that touches, lightly and with unforgettable humour, on the conflict between religious and secular worlds, and the hypocrisies that run through both.

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'One of our most consistently brilliant, bold and funny writers' Dave Eggers'His writing is liberal in every good sense of the word' Jonathan FranzenA spellbinding thriller. A spy novel. A love story . . . Prisoner Z, held at a black site in the Negev desert for a dozen years, has only his guard for company. How does a nice American Jewish boy from Long Island wind up an Israeli spy working for Mossad, and later, a traitor to his adopted country? What does it mean to be loyal? And what does it mean to be a traitor when the ideals you cherish are betrayed by the country you love?'Englander is a wonderfully gifted writer' The Times'One of the great voices of our time' Gary Shteyngart

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Buenos Aires, 1970s. Kaddish Poznan chips the names off gravestones for a living, removing traces of disreputable ancestors for their more respectable kin. His wife Lillian works in insurance, earning money when people live longer than they fear. When the government is overthrown in a military coup, their son Pato is arrested by the police and becomes one of the disappeared. Desperate to find him, Kaddish and Lillian turn to the Ministry of Special Cases, a bureaucracy of anguish and false promises, and they discover just how far they are willing to go to save their son...

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Ruchama, a wigmaker from an ultra-orthodox Brooklyn enclave, journeys into Manhattan for inspiration, frequenting a newsstand where she flips through forbidden fashion magazines. An elderly Jew with a long, white beard reluctantly works as a department store Santa Claus every year - until he can take it no longer. And a Hasidic man, frustrated by his wife's lack of interest, gets a dispensation from a rabbi to see a prostitute for the relief of unbearable urges.

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Etgar Keret is an ingenious and original master of the short story. Radical, witty and always unusual, declared a 'genius' by the New York Times, Keret brings all of his prodigious talent to bear in this bestselling collection.A man barges into a writer's house and, holding a gun to his head, demands that he tell him a story, something to take him away from the real world. A pathological liar discovers one day that all the lies he tells come true. A young woman finds a zip in her boyfriend's mouth, and when she opens it he unfolds to reveal a completely different man inside. Suddenly, a Knock on the Door is at once Keret's most mature and most playful work yet, and establishes him as one of the great international writers of our time.

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