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“I’ve been looking at [Keret’s] Substack and it’s so witty and enjoyable, and he’s clearly having a wonderful time doing it, I thought, ‘maybe I could do that’” — Salman Rushdie, The Guardian

Sisyphus

In honor of Groundhog Day, I’d like to share with you one of the first stories I ever wrote, which has only just been translated into English (thanks, Jessica!). I wrote it during my first week of college. I was taking a class on the history of the novel, taught by a well-known and brilliant literary scholar named Meir Sternberg. In one of his lectures, he explained that while a literary description can be circular, repeating itself without developing at all (“the waves lapped at the pier again and again”), a story, by definition, must be linear: it cannot end at the point where it began. I tried to challenge this observation. It was the first time I’d spoken in class, and I was nervous and stammering. Professor Sternberg cut me off mid-sentence, walked towards me in a slightly menacing way, and said, “If you think I’m wrong, then instead of arguing, just show me a story that does that. A story that ends exactly where it started.” And so, after class, I found somewhere to sit in the library and started mentally scanning all the stories I’d ever read, desperately searching for one that would disprove the professor’s thesis. After two frustrating hours, unable to remember even a single story that fit the bill, I decided to write one myself.

Read at Alphabet Soup

Endlessly inventive short stories

Yet for all its vast reach, Keret’s prose, translated from Hebrew by Jessica Cohen and Sondra Silverston, is downbeat and matter-of-fact. It’s full of people negotiating the bewildering and alienating and bathetic furniture of modernity: Tinder dates, Zoom calls, Skype meetings, virtual reality, small ads, tedious queues, spoiler alerts, unexpected deaths. Autocorrect isn’t so much a book as a library of tiny books, from an author who conveys as well as any I can think of just how much fun you can have with a short story.

— Sam Leith, The Guardian

Photograph: Rolf_52/Alamy — Selfie sticks and surrealism in Autocorrect.

אוטוקורקט

"היקום הקורס אל תוך עצמו של קרת הוא היקום שלנו, ולמול התחושה שלא נותרו לנו בו כמעט שום נקודות ייחוס יציבות, הכתיבה הקרתית היא נקודת ייחוס יציבה; ומוכרותה, שבנסיבות אחרות הייתה יכולה לשמש כטיעון כנגדה, הופכת לעוגן חיוני מתמיד. כי בקיום שמשתנה באופן בלתי נסבל כל כך, הופך הקבוע והיציב לאפשרות היחידה שלנו לזהות את עצמנו, לנקודת הייחוס שלמולה אנו יכולים לתפוס את ההשתנות ולאמוד את דרכנו על פני המסלול הבלתי מובן שעושה הכוכב שבו נגזר עלינו לחיות."

- שירי ארצי, ידיעות

“What About Me?“

Written by Etgar Keret and Shira Geffen for “Short Stories on Human Rights“ (2008).

More films

Random quote

Smoking dope is illegal, but screaming at an Arab who ran over a little girl — that's not only legal, it's downright normative.

— "One Gram Short"

איך זה נגמר בסוף כולם יודעים

נקמה מול נחמה — זהו העימות האמיתי המתחולל כרגע בישראל, והוא מתקיים בכל הגזרות: מפגישת הצעקות של ראש הממשלה נתניהו עם ראשי מערכת הביטחון ועד להתפרעות בשדה תימן. אלוהים גדול, על זה כולם מסכימים, אבל מה עומד אצלו קודם ברשימת המטלות: פדיון שבויים או מחיקת זרע עמלק?

More non-fiction

Words Without Borders, 2010

I believe that there is a truth. I believe it is very difficult to articulate that truth. I try to go in that direction, but I don’t pretend I will get there.

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New York Times, 2012

For Keret, the creative impulse resides not in a conscious devotion to the classic armature of fiction (character, plot, theme, etc.) but in an allegiance to the anarchic instigations of the subconscious. His best stories display a kind of irrepressible dream logic

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