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.

Keret is famous for his dry, winsome comic sketches, often using fantastical or science-fictional settings, with clever hooks and twists and a melancholic aftertaste.

Keret, a doyen of the short story, typically takes his task quite literally: Whatever else it may be, a story by the Israeli writer is quite likely to be short. That's true as well in Autocorrect, the latest of the Israeli writer's collections to be translated into English. Most of the stories here last no more than a handful of pages. But don't mistake his characteristic concision and humor for flippancy. Some of these stories — originally published in Hebrew, in the long shadow of the Oct. 7 attacks and the war in Gaza — hit like a punch to the gut from a passing stranger.

It is true that many of the stories are funny and thought-provoking. They’re what you’d call dark comedy. But in Autocorrect, there’s something further. Even in works of dark comedy, we often get a sense that a system of justice, sometimes called karma, exists in the world. A person behaves in an evil, cruel, or merely unpleasant way, and something bad happens to them in turn. One can either believe this is an aspect of wish fulfillment in art, or an intrinsic property to the real moral, spiritual, or even physical universe — the reader can decide for themselves. Autocorrect is willing to live outside of this framework.

A bemusing clutch of comic vignettes alert to contemporary anxieties. For veteran Israeli writer Keret, technology doesn’t simplify our lives so much as amplify our foibles….In its strongest moments, what resonates most aren’t Keret’s high-concept predicaments, but the determination of characters to preserve their humanity despite them. Wry, affectionate, tart storytelling with Keret’s trademark comic kick.

“Autocorrect” is one of the 33 short, short stories in Autocorrect by Etgar Keret, translated by Jessica Cohen and Sondra Silverston (Riverhead Books, May 27, 2025). Readers familiar with Keret will be entertained by more examples of his creative imagination, while those meeting him for the first time will encounter his original humorous insights into Israeli culture and modern life, with a touch of science fiction thrown in for good measure. 

קובץ סיפורים חדש של הסופר המוערך הוא ללא ספק מאורע ספרותי, כזה ששמור לרגעים האופטימיים. אלא שמבלי לשים לב, הדבר שנוכח יותר מכל ב"אוטוקורקט", הוא המוות שאורב לנו: בעריסה, בטביעה, ממחלה, בדרך הביתה שיכור מהבר, בתאונת דרכים, וגם בטבח 7 באוקטובר - שנדמה כמו עוד הזיה אפוקליפטית מסיפוריו של אחד הכותבים הטובים בארץ, רק כזאת שהפכה למציאות חיינו

צילום: גבריאל בהרליה

Keret applies magical realism to the angst that claws at the insides of his characters. But this collection features some of the darkest imagery Keret has brought to print to date

Etgar Keret finds the humor in situations surreal and heartbreaking, from fatherhood to bro-ish metafictional fables

A dazzling collection by one of the best short story writers of our times combines the absurdity of a Coen brothers film plot with the surrealism of Franz Kafka’s writing

Often these figures are wonderfully average, slightly clueless men whose troubles have left them directionless and, perhaps counterintuitively, emotionally open. It’s precisely that openness, that low-level hum of receptivity that predisposes them to a kind of quotidian sweetness and light that leaves you with a soft sigh, and maybe even a tear

The book shows a master of the short story pushing against the limits of what the form can achieve

Keret risks sentimentality recklessly and often. When it works, the payoff is powerful: a palpable urgency of emotion. There’s a lot of love in this book. One hopes it’s contagious

The writing here reveals that some of the strangeness Keret works into his fiction comes from the unique way he sees the real world: a little bent, exasperated, amused and yet also with deep wells of kindness

If you read only one book of short stories this year, it should be this one

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

The stories are all thought-experiments. What if, they ask. Why not? And, what the heck? Like all art, they are highly patterned, highly charged, refracted reflections on the chaos and randomness of everyday existence

Like fables and parables, most of these stories are not tied to a specific time or place. Keret’s satire may be local, but his ironies are global; this is a master storyteller, creating deep, tragic, funny, painful tales with scarcely more words than you’ve read in this review