Introduction

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.

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Excerpt

When the Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser took control of the Suez Canal, threatening Western access to that vital route, an agitated France shifted allegiances, joining forces with Britain and Israel against Egypt. This is a fact neither here nor there, except that during the 1956 Sinai Campaign there were soldiers in the Israeli army and soldiers in the Egyptian army who ended up wearing identical French- supplied uniforms to battle. ... view entire excerpt...

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Weblinks

»	Publisher's Book Info
»	Nathan Englander's Website

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