The best work yet from the Pulitzer finalist and best-selling author of For the Relief of Unbearable Urges–a political thriller that unfolds in the highly charged territory of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and pivots on the complex relationship between a secret prisoner and his guard.

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 these vastly different lives Nathan Englander has woven a powerful, intensely suspenseful portrait of a nation riven by insoluble conflict, even as the lives of its citizens become fatefully and inextricably entwined–a political thriller of the highest order that interrogates the anguished, violent division between Israelis and Palestinians, and dramatizes the immense moral ambiguities haunting both sides. Who is right, who is wrong–who is the guard, who is truly the prisoner?
     A tour de force from one of America’s most acclaimed voices in contemporary fiction.

A story from the collection FOR THE RELIEF OF UNBEARABLE URGES, a work of startling authority and imagination–an audiobook that is as wondrous and joyful as it is wrenchingly sad.

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK

“Taut, edgy, sharply observed. . . . A revelation of the human condition.” –The New York Times Book Review

The celebrated Pulitzer finalist and prize-winning author of Dinner at the Center of the Earth and What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank delivers his best work yet, a streamlined comic masterpiece about a son’s failure to say Kaddish for his father.
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—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.
Sharp, irreverent, hilarious, and wholly irresistible, Englander’s tale of a son who makes a diabolical compromise ingeniously captures the tensions between tradition and modernity—a book to be devoured in a single sitting whose pleasures and provocations will be savored long after.

A story from the collection FOR THE RELIEF OF UNBEARABLE URGES, a work of startling authority and imagination–an audiobook that is as wondrous and joyful as it is wrenchingly sad.

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK

“Taut, edgy, sharply observed. . . . A revelation of the human condition.” –The New York Times Book Review

A story from the collection FOR THE RELIEF OF UNBEARABLE URGES, a work of startling authority and imagination–an audiobook that is as wondrous and joyful as it is wrenchingly sad.

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK

“Taut, edgy, sharply observed. . . . A revelation of the human condition.” –The New York Times Book Review

A story from the collection FOR THE RELIEF OF UNBEARABLE URGES, a work of startling authority and imagination–an audiobook that is as wondrous and joyful as it is wrenchingly sad.

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK

“Taut, edgy, sharply observed. . . . A revelation of the human condition.” –The New York Times Book Review

A story from the collection FOR THE RELIEF OF UNBEARABLE URGES, a work of startling authority and imagination–an audiobook that is as wondrous and joyful as it is wrenchingly sad.

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK

“Taut, edgy, sharply observed. . . . A revelation of the human condition.” –The New York Times Book Review

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 the heart of Argentina’s Dirty War, Kaddish Poznan struggles with a son who won’t accept him; strives for a wife who forever saves him; and spends his nights protecting the good name of a community that denies his existence–and denies a checkered history that only Kaddish holds dear.
Nathan Englander’s first novel is a timeless story of fathers and sons. In a world turned upside down, where the past and the future, 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. The Ministry of Special Cases, like Englander’s stories before it, is a celebration of our humanity, in all its weakness, and–despite that–hope.

A story from the collection FOR THE RELIEF OF UNBEARABLE URGES, in which Englander envisions a group of Polish Jews herded toward a train bound for the death camps and, in a deft, imaginative twist, turns them into acrobats tumbling out of harm’s way. FOR THE RELIEF OF UNBEARABLE URGES is a work of startling authority and imagination–an audiobook that is as wondrous and joyful as it is wrenchingly sad.

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK

“Taut, edgy, sharply observed. . . . A revelation of the human condition.” –The New York Times Book Review
 

 A story from the collection FOR THE RELIEF OF UNBEARABLE URGES, a work of startling authority and imagination–an audiobook that is as wondrous and joyful as it is wrenchingly sad.

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK

“Taut, edgy, sharply observed. . . . A revelation of the human condition.” –The New York Times Book Review

A story from the collection FOR THE RELIEF OF UNBEARABLE URGES, a work of startling authority and imagination–an audiobook that is as wondrous and joyful as it is wrenchingly sad.  “The Wig” takes an aging wigmaker and makes her, for a single moment, beautiful.

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK

“Taut, edgy, sharply observed. . . . A revelation of the human condition.” –The New York Times Book Review

These eight new stories from the celebrated novelist and short-story writer Nathan Englander display a gifted young author grappling with the great questions of modern life, with a command of language and the imagination that place Englander at the very forefront of contemporary American fiction.
 
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. Marking a return to two of Englander’s classic themes, “Peep Show” and “How We Avenged the Blums” wrestle with sexual longing and ingenuity in the face of adversity and peril. And “Everything I Know About My Family on My Mother’s Side” is suffused with an intimacy and tenderness that break new ground for a writer who seems constantly to be expanding the parameters of what he can achieve in the short form.
 
Beautiful and courageous, funny and achingly sad, Englander’s work is a revelation.