Etgar Keret is an ingenious and original master of the short story. Radical, witty and always unusual, declared a 'genius' by the New York Times, Keret brings all of his prodigious talent to bear in this bestselling collection.
A man barges into a writer's house and, holding a gun to his head, demands that he tell him a story, something to take him away from the real world. A pathological liar discovers one day that all the lies he tells come true. A young woman finds a zip in her boyfriend's mouth, and when she opens it he unfolds to reveal a completely different man inside. Suddenly, a Knock on the Door is at once Keret's most mature and most playful work yet, and establishes him as one of the great international writers of our time.
Born in Tel Aviv in 1967, Etgar Keret is one of the leading voices in Israeli literature and cinema. He is the author of five bestselling collections, which have been translated into twenty-nine languages. His writing has been published in the New York Times, le Monde, the Guardian, the Paris Review and Zoetrope. He has also written a number of award-winning screenplays, and Jellyfish, the first film that he directed -along with his wife Shira Geffen - won the Camera d'Or prize for best first feature at Cannes in 2007. In 2010 he was awarded the Chevalier medallion of France's Order of Arts and Letters.
Title: Suddenly, a Knock on the Door
Author: Keret, Etgar
ISBN: 9780099563327
Binding:
Publisher: Vintage Publishing
Publication Date: 2013-03-07
Number of Pages: 304
Weight: 0.2223 kg
Etgar Keret has written several great books, but this is his greatest. These stories are the most funny, dark and poignant I've read in a long time. It's tempting to say they are his most Kafkaesque, but in fact they are his most Keretesque * Jonathan Safran Foer *
Distinctive, understated and very funny... If you read only one book of short stories this year, it should be this one * Daily Mail *
Etgar Keret is a great short story writer whose work is all the greater because it's funny...The stories are all thought-experiments. What if, they ask. Why not? And, what the heck? Like all art, they are highly patterned, highly charged, refracted reflections on the chaos and randomness of everyday existence * Guardian *
A maddening, abruptly moving and effortlessly funny collection ... Clever, relevant and oddly resonant, Suddenly a Knock on the Door is Keret's best, most mature work and the perfect introduction to his sad, strange and moving fiction * Independent *
At once sophisticated and anti-literary, extremely funny and slyly serious. While invariably set in contemporary Israel, and full of sex and violence, they also hark back to older storytelling traditions such as the parable, the folk tale and the absurdist fiction of Gogol and Kafka * Observer *
