For the Relief of Unbearable Urges: Stories (Vintage International) - Softcover

Englander, Nathan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0375704434 ISBN 13: 9780375704437

Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group, 2000

Synopsis

Energized, irreverent, and deliciously inventive stories from Pulitzer-nominated, bestselling author of What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank.

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.

About this title

Review

Nathan Englander is only 29, but his first collection of short stories has already been compared to the work of Saul Bellow and Philip Roth. His characters are Jewish Americans--Hasidic to boot--and his subject-matter is the agony of family life, love lost and found and that favourite Jewish stand-by: guilt. Englander's touch, though, is light and relentlessly comic. His characters' fast-talking, self-deprecating dialogue wouldn't seem out of place in the TV series Seinfeld (when the newly converted Charles and his wife serve up a kosher dinner they promise "eighty dollars' worth of the blandest food you've ever had"; or then there's Mendel who wakes up thinking he's dead, says a prayer for himself, then worries "that the first thing he had done upon being dead was sin"). So deeply does Englander get into Yiddish culture that a glossary of terms would be useful to the goyshe reader, but it does enhance the atmosphere wherein a troubled people struggle with religious and cultural strictures that, at times, threaten to swamp their individuality. This is a deeply felt book, and Englander is a brilliant, subtle writer who challenges the neuroses of these chosen few with flair and the sympathy of a knowledgeable insider. --Lilian Pizzichini

Review

"Englander's voice is distinctly his own--daring, funny and exuberant." --Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times"Taut, edgy, sharply observed. . . . A revelation of the human condition." --The New York Times Book Review"Remarkable art. . . .The author fills each of these pieces with vivid life, with characters that jump off the page." --Newsday"Every so often there's a new voice that entirely revitalizes the story. . . . It's happening again with Nathan Englander, whose precise, funny, heartbreaking, well-controlled but never contrived stories open a window on a fascinating landscape we might never have known was there. It's the best story collection I've read in ages." --Ann Beattie"His characters are marvelously sympathetic creations. . . . What is most striking about the collection is not the subject matter but Englander's genius for telling a tale. . . . Invite[s] comparison to some of the best storytellers--Gogol, Singer, Kafka and even John Cheever." --Time Out New York

About this edition

• Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0375704434
• ISBN 13: 9780375704437
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224