For the Relief of Unbearable Urges

Zusatztext "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 Informationen zum Autor Nathan Englander is the author of the novel  The Ministry of Special Cases  and the story collections  For the Relief of Unbearable Urges  and  What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank , a winner of the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He is Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at New York University and lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and daughter. Klappentext 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.From "The Twenty-Seventh Man": The orders were given from Stalin's country house at Kuntsevo. He relayed them to the agent in charge with no greater emotion than for the killing of kulaks or clergy or the outspoken wives of very dear friends. The accused were to be apprehended the same day, arrive at the prison gates at the same moment, and--with a gasp and simultaneous final breath--be sent off to their damnation in a single rattling burst of gunfire. It was not an issue of hatred, only one of allegiance. For Stalin knew there could be loyalty to only one nation. What he did not know so well were the authors' names on his list. When it was presented to him the next morning he signed the warrant anyway, though there were now twenty-seven, and yesterday there had been twenty-six. No matter, except maybe to the twenty-seventh. The orders left little room for variation, and none for tardiness. They were to be carried out in secrecy and--the only point that was reiterated--simultaneously. But how were the agents to get the men from Moscow and Gorky, Smolensk and Penza, Shuya and Podolsk, to the prison near the village of X at the very same time? The agent in charge felt his strength was in leadership and gave up the role of strategist to the inside of his hat. He cut the list into strips and sprinkled them into the freshly blocked crown, mixing carefully so as not to disturb its shape. Most of these writers were in Moscow. The handful who were in their native villages, taking the waters somewhere, or locked in a cabin trying to finish that seminal work would surely receive a stiff cuffing when a pair o...

Product details

• Authors: Nathan Englander
• Publisher: Vintage USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 21.03.2000
• EAN: 9780375704437
• ISBN: 978-0-375-70443-7
• No. of pages: 224
• Dimensions: 130 mm x 205 mm x 15 mm
• Series: Vintage International; Vintage International
• Subject: Fiction > Narrative literature