Try our Advanced SearchShort stories by Nathan Englander
Nathan Englander's most recent novel is kaddish.com. He is also the author of the Dinner at the Center of the Earth, the collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, as well as the internationally bestselling story collection For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, and the novel The Ministry of Special Cases (all published by Knopf/Vintage). He was the 2012 recipient of the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award and a finalist for the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for What We Talk About. His short fiction and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, The Washington Post, Vogue, and Esquire, among other places. His work has been anthologized in The O. Henry Prize Stories and numerous editions of The Best American Short Stories, including 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories. Translated into twenty-two languages, Englander was selected as one of “20 Writers for the 21st Century” by The New Yorker, received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a PEN/Malamud Award, the Bard Fiction Prize, and the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts & Letters. He’s been a fellow at the Dorothy & Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, and at The American Academy of Berlin. In 2012 Englander's translation of the New American Haggadah (edited by Jonathan Safran Foer) was published by Little Brown. He also co-translated Etgar Keret's Suddenly A Knock at the Door and Fly Already, published by FSG. His play The Twenty-Seventh Man premiered at the Public Theater in 2012, and his new play, What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, winner of a 2019 Edgerton Foundation New Play Award, and the 2020 Blanche and Irving Laurie Theatre Visions Fund Prize, was commissioned by Lincoln Center Theater and was supposed to be running at The Old Globe in San Diego right now—sigh. He is Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University and lives with his family in Toronto.
Listing 5 stories.
A Polish-Israeli produce vendor's son is mystified by his father's kind treatment of a philosophy professor as he slowly learns of the murders in the man's past.
When an anti-Semitic teenager attacks a Jewish boy, war breaks out between the teenage boy factions of 1980s Long Island.
A middle-aged man in Manhattan has a sudden epiphany that he is Jewish. He struggles to navigate his new feelings of religious devotion alongside his wife’s strong disapproval.
The Jewish inhabitants of Poland are forced into relocation when a war invades their previously untouched city. When they escape via train, they find themselves on board with circus performers, so they too practice performing in order to blend in before the train arrives at their next show.
When a middle-aged man is visited by his wife’s two orthodox friends from Jerusalem, the husband finds his secular Jewish lifestyle in South Florida under attack. To clear the air between them, the two couples smoke weed.