The Ministry of Special Cases » (Reprint)

Nathan Englander was born in New York in 1970. His short fiction has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, and numerous anthologies including The Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Anthology, and The Pushcart Prize. Englander's story collection, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges (Knopf, 1999), earned him a PEN/Malamud Award and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Sue Kauffman Prize. He was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2003 and a Fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library in 2004. He lives in Manhattan.

From Nathan Englander, author of the literary sensation For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, a spectacular debut novel set at the height of Argentina's Dirty War.

An unforgettable work of realism and of the imagination, a hallucinatory journey into a world of terror, into a forbidden city within a city at a time of radical instability and dislocation, Englander's novel moves effortlessly between the cosmic and the minute, wrestling with extraordinary themes and binding them into an exceptionally crafted narrative that fuses absurdity and desolation with transcendence and abiding love. The fate of the Jews; the fate of the disappeared; the fate of one family- of a hopelessly lost father and a hopelessly lost son all meet in the dark, inescapably tortuous corridors of the Ministry of Special Cases...

The New York Times - Will Blythe

Beautifully written, The Ministry of Special Cases nonetheless presents a conundrum. Englander does in fiction what his absent God cannot: create a world. And then he peoples that world with characters that he treats better than history ever would. Such decency is not a large failing in a young novelist. If only the junta had been half so kind.