For the Relief of Unbearable Urges - Softcover

Englander, Nathan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0571201318 ISBN 13: 9780571201310

Publisher: Faber & Faber, 2000

Synopsis

Nathan Englander's first work of fiction, published when he was in his late twenties, landed him firmly in the company of Bellow, Malamud, Singer and Roth, with ten delightfully irreverent stories rooted in the weight of Jewish history and the customs of orthodox life. For the Relief of Unbearable Urges is bold, funny and irresistibly inventive, a brilliant tragi-comic vision delivered in a voice that is as humorous and full of life as it is sorrowful and haunted - a work of stunning authority and imagination.

In 'The Twenty-Seventh Man' a clerical error brings earnest, unpublished Pinchas into the company of writers slated for execution at the order of Stalin; in 'The Tumblers' a group of Jews fated for Auschwitz improvise an escape by blending into a troop of acrobats and teaching themselves to tumble; in the title story, a married Hasidic man incensed by his wife's interminable menstrual cycle gets a dispensation from a rabbi to see a prostitute, 'for the reliefof unbearable urges'. Englander's stories are wise and compassionate, at once outrageous and wrenchingly sad.

About this title

About the Author

Nathan Englander was born in 1970. His first book, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, a collection of short stories, was published in May 1999 and became an international bestseller. It earned him a PEN/Faulkner Malamud Award and the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Nathan was selected as one of '20 Writers for the 21st Century' by The New Yorker, was awarded the Bard Fiction Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship. 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. His first novel, The Ministry of Special Cases, was published in 2007.

Edition details

• Publisher: Faber & Faber
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0571201318
• ISBN 13: 9780571201310
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224