Parlez-Moi D'Anne Frank

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.