Etgar Keret
"The Girl on the Fridge" on Richard Rayner's shortlist (LA Times)
The prose zips, the effects unsettle -- Keret is himself something of a magician, and what he pulls from his hat feels lively indeed.
Heeb Magazine: Things Fall Apart
Though rooted in ordinary events—birthday parties, traffic jams—and told in straightforward, unadorned prose, the fantastic inevitably creeps in, leaving his stories with a strange foreboding. Such is the case in “Hat Trick,” in which an unwitting magician starts pulling severed rabbits and headless babies out of his hat to the delight of his underage audience; or “Crazy Glue,” in which a marital dispute is solved when the woman pastes herself to the ceiling with super glue. This surrealism, coupled with glib narration, belies how serious a writer Keret is and how dark his subject matter. This does not mean that the author’s bizarre scenes won’t make you laugh—they will—but just as often, that laughter will get stuck in your throat
"The Girl on the Fridge" is out.
Here's a couple of reviews:
Village Voice
By his own metric, Keret (whose last collection was The Nimrod Flipout) is the raging asthmatic of short-fiction writers, his words chosen and few, his stories issued with the urgency of an inhaler's blast.San Diego Union-Tribune
Rarely are stories as economical as Keret's, and rarely are economical stories as affecting as these. Keret, an Israeli writer whose work has been featured on “This American Life” and “Selected Shorts,” explores the nature of violence and alienation from a surreal, whimsical perspective in writings that rarely exceeds five pages in length. Even the most impatient reader has time for these quick reads.
Etgar Keret's page at ITHL (Institute for the Translation of Hebrew Literature).
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