Fly Already

July 1, 2019
The Israeli short story writer once again displays his knack for comic, absurd, occasionally dystopian observations. In 2004, Keret (The Seven Good Years, 2015, etc.) wrote a children's book called Dad Runs Away With the Circus, a sly tale about a father chafing at the binds of domesticity. He's still exploring the theme a decade and a half later: The narrator of the title story is trying to save a potential suicide on a nearby rooftop, but his toddler son is clamoring for ice cream while the dad in "To the Moon and Back" promises anything in a candy shop to his son--who then petulantly demands the cash register. (The kids aren't such great fans of conventional families either: In the gently Kafkaesque "Dad With Mashed Potatoes," three children are happily convinced their father has shape-shifted into a rabbit.) Keret, who earlier in his career worked more often in flash-fiction mode, benefits from a wider canvas here, particularly in Saunders-esque speculative stories like "Tabula Rasa," a fable about cloning, or "Ladder," about the angels left to maintain heaven after God dies. And though Keret has typically eschewed directly addressing tensions in his home country, a number of these stories display the sharp spikes of good political satire, like "Arctic Lizard," which imagines teenagers recruited for war duty during Trump's third term. Better still is an untitled story constructed of emails between the director of an escape room who refuses to open his doors on Holocaust Remembrance Day and a stubborn would-be patron; their cartoonishly escalating squabble exemplifies the scramble for the moral high ground that characterizes diplomatic rhetoric. A handful of pieces have flat jokes or weak concepts, but every piece demonstrates Keret's admirable effort to play with structure and gleefully refuse to be polite about family, faith, and country. An irreverent storyteller who has yet to run out of social norms to skewer.

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July 15, 2019
Keret (The Seven Good Years) balances gravitas and drollery in this collection of 23 pieces. Stories often begin with declarative sentences—“I celebrate the kid’s birthday the day after.”—that presume an intimacy with the reader and immediately engage. Many are very short; “Evolution of a Breakup,” “At Night,” “The Next-to-Last Time I Was Shot Out of a Cannon,” each capture a moment of emotional complexity. Longer stories start with that same directness and add complications. “Tabula Rasa” begins with the explanation of a frightening recurrent dream rooted in academia and ends with echoes of the Holocaust. In “Crumb Cake,” Mom is grumbling because her 50-year-old son is unsatisfied with the birthday cake she has made him. As a lunch celebration plays out, deeper fissures in their relationship are revealed. The longest story, “Pineapple Crush,” begins with “the first hit of the day” and follows the tumultuous life of a functioning drug addict who has a job working with an after-school program. Peppered throughout the book is an email thread about terrorism, Nazism, and UFOs; it’s the most unconventional story of all, bringing home the idea that the personal is political. The endlessly inventive Keret finds the truth underlying even the simplest human interactions.

September 1, 2019

In the title story of this collection from Israeli author Keret (The Girl on the Fridge), a man on the ledge of a four-story building is mistaken by a little boy for a superhero poised to take flight, and so he is, but only as far as the street. In "One Gram Short," the narrator seeks to score enough marijuana to impress a waitress he likes; his source is a lawyer who, in exchange for the dope, wants the narrator to create a "scene" in court in support of the lawyer's case, which he assumes will shake up the judge. In "The Next-to-Last Time I Was Shot Out of a Cannon," it takes the hapless narrator being propelled through the air to have the experience of someone smiling at him. All the stories are like this--quirky, funny, touching, immensely readable, pure pleasure--and though most are very short, they are tightly scripted and satisfyingly complete. VERDICT Originally written in Hebrew, the pieces in this fine collection lose nothing in translation; the wit and humanity of each tale survive intact. Ideal reading for short bursts of time or short attention spans. [See Prepub Alert, 3/4/19.]--Michael Russo, Louisiana State Univ., Baton Rouge

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August 1, 2019
It's difficult to characterize the work of a writer as prodigiously talented as Keret, author of Suddenly, a Knock on the Door (2012), for whom nothing seems off limits, from the nuances of Jewish-Arab relations in Israel to the late-night concerns of an ambitious goldfish. This smart, strange, completely enthralling collection includes nearly two dozen short stories that span a wide range of topics and tones, from the melancholic aftermath of a suicide jumper to the utterly surreal experience of a clone (or robot, maybe?) alone in a room. If there's a through line, it's narrators who get more than they bargained for. In One Gram Short, the narrator seeks out a small amount of marijuana, only to wind up shouting obscenities inside a courtroom on behalf of a grieving family. In another story, a father desperate to impress his son promises to purchase the actual cash register from a toy store, with predictably hilarious results. While most of these stories debuted in magazines or on NPR, every one's worth a revisit, while readers new to Keret will be dazzled.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)