Etgar Keret

Over the last seven years Etgar Keret has had plenty of reasons to worry. His son, Lev, was born in the middle of a terrorist attack in Tel Aviv. His father became ill. And he has been constantly tormented by nightmarish visions of the Iranian president Ahmadinejad, anti-Semitic remarks both real and imagined, and, perhaps most worrisome of all, a dogged telemarketer who seems likely to chase him to the grave. Emerging from these darkly absurd circumstances is a series of funny, tender ruminations on everything from his three-year-old son's impending military service to the terrorist mindset behind Angry Birds. Moving deftly between the personal and the political, the playful and the profound, The Seven Good Years takes a life-affirming look at the human need to find good in the least likely places, and the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of our capricious world.

Classic warped and wonderful stories from a "genius" (The New York Times) and master storyteller. Brief, intense, painfully funny, and shockingly honest, Etgar Keret's stories are snapshots that illuminate with intelligence and wit the hidden truths of life. As with the best writers of fiction, hilarity and anguish are the twin pillars of his work. Keret covers a remarkable emotional and narrative terrain--from a father's first lesson to his boy to a standoff between soldiers caught up in the Middle East conflict to a slice of life where nothing much happens. New to Riverhead's list, these wildly inventive, uniquely humane stories are for fans of Etgar Keret's inimitable style and readers of transforming, brilliant fiction.

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 dark and surreal collection of stories from the author of The Nimrod Flipout and The Girl on the Fridge. With Suddenly, a Knock on the Door, "It's tempting to say," according to Jonathan Safran Foer, " these stories] are his most Kafkaesque, but in fact they are his most Keretesque." Bringing up a child, lying to the boss, placing an order in a fast-food restaurant: in Etgar Keret's short story collection, daily life is complicated, dangerous, and full of yearning. In his most playful and most mature work yet, the living and the dead, silent children and talking animals, dreams and waking life coexist in an uneasy world. Overflowing with absurdity, humor, sadness, and compassion, the tales in Suddenly, a Knock on the Door establish Etgar Keret--declared a "genius" by The New York Times--as one of the most original writers of his generation.

Kneller's Happy Campers is a strange, dark but funny tale set in a world very much like our own but it's an afterlife populated by people who have killed themselves - many of them are young, and most of them bear the marks of their death... bullet wounds, broken necks...(those who have over-dosed are known as 'Juliets'). When Mordy, our hero, discovers that his girlfriend from his life before has also 'offed' herself, he sets out to find her, and so follows a strange adventure... Full of the weird and wonderful characters, and the slightly surreal twist of events that we've come to expect from Etgar Keret, this novella is full of humour and comic flashes, but it is also wistful, longing for a better world and perfect love.

Read the stories that made Etgar Keret Israel's most popular and acclaimed young writer with The Girl on the Fridge. A birthday-party magician whose hat tricks end in horror and gore; a girl parented by a major household appliance; the possessor of the lowest IQ in the Mossad--such are the denizens of Etgar Keret's dark and fertile mind. The Girl on the Fridge contains the best of Keret's first collections, the ones that made him a household name in Israel and the major discovery of this last decade.

'Etgar Keret's short stories are fierce, funny, full of energy and insight, and at the same time they are often deep, tragic and very moving' - Amos OzAt a children's tea party, a magician tries to pull a rabbit out of a hat, but takes out only its head;

In this collection of brilliant, bite-sized satiric tales, Israel's bestselling Etgar Keret chronicles the strange ironies that suffuse his characters' lives.

From Israel's most popular and acclaimed young writer--"Stories that are short, strange, funny, deceptively casual in tone and affect, stories that sound like a joke but aren't" (Yann Martel, author of Life of Pi) Already featured on This American Life and Selected Shorts and in Zoetrope: All Story and L. A. Weekly, these short stories include a man who finds equal pleasure in his beautiful girlfriend and the fat, soccer-loving lout she turns into after dark; shrinking parents; a case of impotence cured by a pet terrier; and a pessimistic Middle Eastern talking fish. A bestseller in Israel, The Nimrod Flipout is an extraordinary collection from the preeminent Israeli writer of his generation.

Two writers, Israeli Etgar Keret and Palestinian Samir el-Youssef have engaged in a challenging and provocative artistic collaboration, producing a book of short stories and a novella exploring different aspects of a fraught and complex situation.