Fly Already
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3.8 • 5 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
A brilliant new collection of stories from Etgar Keret, a master of the genre.
There’s no one like Etgar Keret. His stories take place at the crossroads of the fantastical, searing, and hilarious. His characters grapple with parenthood and family, war and games, marijuana and cake, memory and love. These stories never go to the expected place, but always surprise, entertain, and move …
In ‘Arctic Lizard’, a young boy narrates a post-apocalyptic version of the world where a youth army wages an unending war, rewarded by collecting prizes. A father tries to shield his son from the inevitable in ‘Fly Already’. In ‘One Gram Short’, a guy just wants to get a joint to impress a girl and ends up down a rabbit hole of chaos and heartache. And in the masterpiece ‘Pineapple Crush’, two unlikely people connect through an evening smoke down by the beach, only to have one of them imagine a much deeper relationship.
The thread that weaves these pieces together is our inability to communicate, to see so little of the world around us and to understand each other even less. Yet somehow, in these pages, through Etgar’s deep love for humanity and our hapless existence, a bright light shines through and our universal connection to each other sparks alive.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Keret (The Seven Good Years) balances gravitas and drollery in this collection of 23 pieces. Stories often begin with declarative sentences "I celebrate the kid's birthday the day after." that presume an intimacy with the reader and immediately engage. Many are very short; "Evolution of a Breakup," "At Night," "The Next-to-Last Time I Was Shot Out of a Cannon," each capture a moment of emotional complexity. Longer stories start with that same directness and add complications. "Tabula Rasa" begins with the explanation of a frightening recurrent dream rooted in academia and ends with echoes of the Holocaust. In "Crumb Cake," Mom is grumbling because her 50-year-old son is unsatisfied with the birthday cake she has made him. As a lunch celebration plays out, deeper fissures in their relationship are revealed. The longest story, "Pineapple Crush," begins with "the first hit of the day" and follows the tumultuous life of a functioning drug addict who has a job working with an after-school program. Peppered throughout the book is an email thread about terrorism, Nazism, and UFOs; it's the most unconventional story of all, bringing home the idea that the personal is political. The endlessly inventive Keret finds the truth underlying even the simplest human interactions.
Customer Reviews
The kosher male Joy Williams
Author
Israeli writer of short stories, graphic novels, and film and television scripts
Stories
22: all relatively short. Some are better than others but they’re all well crafted. Mr Keret is able to convey a lot in very few words.
Prose
Dark, dry humour that is always thought provoking.
Bottom line
A kosher male version of Joy Williams