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Stories
by Etgar Keret
From a "genius" (New York Times) storyteller: a new, subversive, hilarious, heart-breaking collection.
There's no one like Etgar Keret. His stories take place at the crossroads of the fantastical, searing, and hilarious. His characters grapple with parenthood and family, war and games, marijuana and cake, memory and love. These stories never go to the expected place, but always surprise, entertain, and move...
In "Arctic Lizard," a young boy narrates a post-apocalyptic version of the world where a youth army wages an unending war, rewarded by collecting prizes. A father tries to shield his son from the inevitable in "Fly Already." In "One Gram Short," a guy just wants to get a joint to impress a girl and ends up down a rabbit hole of chaos and heartache. And in the masterpiece "Pineapple Crush," two unlikely people connect through an evening smoke down by the beach, only to have one of them imagine a much deeper relationship.
The thread that weaves these pieces together is our inability to communicate, to see so little of the world around us and to understand each other even less. Yet somehow, in these pages, through Etgar's deep love for humanity and our hapless existence, a bright light shines through and our universal connection to each other sparks alive.
"The endlessly inventive Keret finds the truth underlying even the simplest human interactions." - Publishers Weekly
"A handful of pieces have flat jokes or weak concepts, but every piece demonstrates Keret's admirable effort to play with structure and gleefully refuse to be polite about family, faith, and country ... An irreverent storyteller who has yet to run out of social norms to skewer." - Kirkus Reviews
"Like Lydia Davis, Etgar Keret has written stories of such singular diminutive style it took the culture a few years to realize: this is not a novelty act. This is the work of a genius, and he can pack more comedy and heartache into a single tale than just about any writer alive. A new book is cause for celebration." – John Freeman, LitHub
"Reading Fly Already is like settling down for a ride in a luxurious car with a world-class driver who has an extremely crazy worldview that doesn't interfere with his amazing driving. Is there any better way to see the world?" – Elif Batuman
"These stories—swervy, thrillingly funny, honest, and almost shockingly alert—disarm a reader in abundant ways. Keret will look at any situation and any type of character with an open eye to all defenses, and slowly (or really quickly) peel these away." – Aimee Bender
This information about Fly Already was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Etgar Keret was born in Ramat Gan and now lives in Tel Aviv. A winner of the French Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres, The Camera D'Or, and the Charles Bronfman Prize, he is the author, most recently, of the memoir The Seven Good Years and story collections like The Bus Driver Who Wanted To Be God. His work has been translated into forty-two languages and has appeared in the New Yorker, the Wall Street Journal, Wired, the Paris Review, and the New York Times, among many other publications, and on This American Life, where he is a regular contributor.
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