What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank is a sensational literary event—Nathan Englander, the author of the national best seller For the Relief of Unbearable Urges returns with a commanding new collection of short stories that establishes him beyond all doubt as the heir to Roth, Malamud, and Babel. A tour de force.
The title story, inspired by Carver’s masterpiece, is a comic classic, a provocative portrait of two marriages in which the Holocaust is played out as a devastating parlor game. “Camp Sundown” is an outlandishly dark story of vigilante justice undertaken by a troop 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 the Israeli 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…A great leap forward from one of our most audacious and important writers.
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The book will be released February 7 and is already receiving a lot of praise.
Starred PW review!
Starred Booklist review!
Starred Kirkus review!
Additional Praise for Nathan Englander’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank:
“A resounding testament to the power of the short story from a master of the form. Englander’s latest hooks you with the same irresistible intimacy, immediacy and deliciousness of stumbling in on a heated altercation that is absolutely none of your business; it’s what great fiction is all about.”
—Téa Obreht
“It takes an exceptional combination of moral humility and moral assurance to integrate fine-grained comedy and large-scale tragedy as daringly as Nathan Englander does.”
—Jonathan Franzen
“What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank vividly displays the humor, complexity, and edge that we’ve come to expect from Nathan Englander’s fiction–always animated by a deep, vibrant core of historical resonance.”
—Jennifer Egan
“Nathan Englander’s elegant, inquisitive, and hilarious fictions are a working definition of what the modern short story can do.”
—Jonathan Lethem
“The depth of Englander’s feeling is the thing that separates him from just about everyone. You can hear his heart thumping feverishly on every page.”
—Dave Eggers
“Nathan Englander is one of those rare writers who, like Faulkner, manages to make his seemingly obsessive, insular concerns all the more universal for their specificity. It’s this neat trick, I think, that makes the stories in his new collection so utterly haunting.”
—Richard Russo