What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank: Stories

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 Carvers 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 Israels 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 Englanders 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 Mothers 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, Englanders work is a revelation.