Authors: Nathan Englander
ISBN-13: 9780375704437, ISBN-10: 0375704434
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Date Published: March 2000
Edition: 1 VINTAGE
Nathan Englander’s short fiction has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, and numerous anthologies, including The Best American Short Stories and The O. Henry Prize Stories. Englander’s story collection, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, earned him a PEN/Malamud Award and the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in New York City.
One of the most stunning literary debuts of our time, these energized, irreverent, and deliciously inventive stories introduce an astonishing new talent.
In the collection's hilarious title story, a Hasidic man gets a special dispensation from his rabbi to see a prostitute. "The Wig" takes an aging wigmaker and makes her, for a single moment, beautiful. In "The Tumblers," Englander envisions a group of Polish Jews herded toward a train bound for the death camps and, in a deft, imaginative twist, turns them into acrobats tumbling out of harm's way.
For the Relief of Unbearable Urges is a work of startling authority and imagination--a book that is as wondrous and joyful as it is wrenchingly sad. It hearalds the arrival of a remarkable new storyteller.
His debut collection of unforgettable stories establishes his voice as unique.
The Twenty-seventh Man | 1 | |
The Tumblers | 25 | |
Reunion | 57 | |
The Wig | 81 | |
The Gilgul of Park Avenue | 107 | |
Reb Kringle | 139 | |
The Last One Way | 153 | |
For the Relief of Unbearable Urges | 175 | |
In This Way We Are Wise | 193 |