Posts Tagged ‘etgar keret’

There’s something about Etgar Keret’s short stories that sound great when read aloud. Fortunately for us, a few of his notable friends have volunteered to read pieces from his latest collection, Suddenly, A Knock on the Door. You can also read Keret’s story “Mystique” along with Willem Dafoe, should you so choose.

“What Animal Are You?” Read by Jonathan Safran Foer

“Mourner’s Meal” Read by Shalom Auslander

“Mystique” Read by Willem Dafoe
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There’s something about Etgar Keret’s short stories that works especially well online. Perhaps it’s their terseness, their easy vernacular, or their wry approach to the fundamental oddness of modern life. Also, magic goldfish.

Gary Shteyngart—novelist, Twitterer, and illiteracy advocate—reads “What, of This Goldfish, Would You Wish?” from Keret’s collection Suddenly, A Knock on The Door. Should you find yourself inspired by Keret’s words (or, for that matter, Shteyngart’s voice), I recommend Something Out of Something, our design contest with BOMB Magazine.

See Also:

“Creative Writing,” The New Yorker, Jan. 2nd, 2012

Here are a few recent additions from our Longreads page, our repository for articles, interviews, and stories longer than 2,000 words. (Also keep an eye out for our Twitter posts marked with the #longreads tag.) From the past thirty days:

• “Late Bloomers” by Alina Simone, in BOMB
• “In Gold We Trust” by Wells Tower, in GQ
• “Creative Writing” by Etgar Keret, in The New Yorker

“A man is sitting in a room, all by himself. He’s lonely. He’s a writer. He wants to write a story. It’s been a long time since he wrote his last story, and he misses it. He misses the feeling of creating something out of something. That’s right—something out something. Because something out of nothing is when you make something up out of thin air, in which case it has no value. Anybody can do that. But when it’s something out of something, that means it was really there the whole time, inside you, and you discover it as part of something new, that’s never happened before.”
—from “Suddenly, a Knock on the Door” by Etgar Keret

Faber & Faber publisher and editor Mitzi Angel writes: “Etgar Keret’s short tales have always resisted classification. Are they fables? Are they forays into the Israeli unconscious? How can they be so funny and so devastatingly sad at the same time? Can you even call Suddenly, A Knock on the Door (Spring 2012) a ‘story collection’? We thought it would be fun to see what his vivid, shape-shifting narratives might inspire in other people, especially given that Etgar has always been interested in blurring the boundaries between different artistic media.” (more…)