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Loading... What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank: Stories (2012)by Nathan Englander
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. Couldn't get very far into this book so I stopped only about 20 pages in..... ( ) Overall, I liked the writing better than the content of most of the stories. I did find the basic ideas of some of the short stories thought provoking, but I was sometimes offended by the direction Englander pursued. For me, the title story was by far the best; however, I did learn from some of the other stories.
It’s the title story and “Everything I Know About My Family” that point to Mr. Englander’s evolution as a writer, his ability to fuse humor and moral seriousness into a seamless narrative, to incorporate elliptical — yes, Carver-esque — techniques into his arsenal of talents to explore how faith and family (and the stories characters tell about faith and family) ineluctably shape an individual’s identity. Light on technical and formal fireworks, heavy on savoury comedy and possessed of a somehow uncontemporary moral gravity, What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank is instead a short story collection of atypical seriousness and grip. Belongs to Publisher SeriesContainsAwardsDistinctionsNotable Lists
Fiction.
Literature.
Short Stories.
HTML:These eight new stories from the celebrated novelist and short-story writer Nathan Englander display a gifted young author grappling with the great questions of modern life, with a command of language and the imagination that place Englander at the very forefront of contemporary American fiction. The title story, inspired by Raymond Carver’s masterpiece, is a provocative portrait of two marriages in which the Holocaust is played out as a devastating parlor game. In the outlandishly dark “Camp Sundown” vigilante justice is undertaken by a group of geriatric campers in a bucolic summer enclave. “Free Fruit for Young Widows” is a small, sharp study in evil, lovingly told by a father to a son. “Sister Hills” chronicles the history of Israel’s settlements from the eve of the Yom Kippur War through the present, a political fable constructed around the tale of two mothers who strike a terrible bargain to save a child. Marking a return to two of Englander’s classic themes, “Peep Show” and “How We Avenged the Blums” wrestle with sexual longing and ingenuity in the face of adversity and peril. And “Everything I Know About My Family on My Mother’s Side” is suffused with an intimacy and tenderness that break new ground for a writer who seems constantly to be expanding the parameters of what he can achieve in the short form. Beautiful and courageous, funny and achingly sad, Englander’s work is a revelation. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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