The second collection of short stories I've enjoyed from Keret. Unlike many practitioners of this genre, his stories are often very short, barely more than five pages. It is testament to the skill of any author to distill an essence into such a limited space. Keret succeeds. His stories pertain broadly to the foibles of humankind—our desires, faults, and weaknesses. Lust and depravity feature too, and although many of Keret's tales could be considered funny, they are also humbling too. We're all, the author seems to say, trying to make it in the face of the world's adversity. There is a particularly Israeli Weltanschauung embedded in these stories, too, appealing to me: eight out of ten.
By Etgar Keret