Latest news with #EtgarKeret
Spectator
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Spectator
Hauntingly re-readable: Autocorrect, by Etgar Keret, reviewed
How to describe the Israeli writer Etgar Keret's stories? Sci-fi scenarios, vignettes, thought experiments, fables, parables? They do not have plots so much as premises from which consequences, extrapolations and ironic complications stem. Unfortunately, the joy of these pieces makes them resistant to reviewing. You have to tell not show their ingenuity. For example, the opening piece, 'A World Without Selfie-Sticks', starts with the conceit of a man yelling at a woman who is the spit of his former partner. But it turns out she really did emigrate to Australia and this woman is her doppelgänger from a parallel universe. Not-Debbie is taking part in Vive la Différence, a gameshow where the contestant has to discover the absent element from our reality. The prize, apart from riches, is to get back, though the losers are stranded – making the story part Oz and part 'Little Mermaid'. The answer to what is missing from our universe is retrospectively obvious in a deeply satisfying and melancholy way. Absurdity is crucial to how Keret's fictions work. Often the technologies or alterations go beyond what actually is. There is a wry disappointment in time travel being used for weight loss or a Loneliness Studies department creating artificial soulmates. Even the more obvious stories are heightened by a pervasive sadness. Keret is similar to writers such as Shalom Auslander and Gary Shteyngart, although Shteyngart is more sombrely manic (even in his restrained new novel Vera, or Faith) and Auslander more uncompromising and caustic. What Keret has instead is Weltschmerz. When he does deal with Arab-Israeli relations straight on – as in 'A Dog for a Dog' – it is with a nauseated incomprehension. The title story has a counter-piece, 'Undo', where it becomes possible for people to use CTRL-Z on the artificial reality they now wholly inhabit. It is commendable that Keret can take broadly the same theme and play it in different keys. The last lines show that, despite having the structures of jokes, Keret's stories are hauntingly re-readable:
The Herald Scotland
14-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Herald Scotland
Poet withdraws from Edinburgh Book Festival over 'genocide apologists'
But in a statement shared on social media he said he was withdrawing over what he called "the festival's insensitive (to say the least) invitation of at least two genocide apologists during Israel's relentless extermination of the Palestinian people". Joudah's announcement on X, posted on Sunday, July 13, was referring to writer Etgar Keret and journalist Anshel Pfeffer, who are both from Israel and appear in the festival's programme. He said: "The festival knew what it was doing when it invited Keret and Pfeffer. "A lack of common decency is a genocide's best friend in a cultural system that continues to endorse the genocide. I will respect my living and my dead." Etgar Keret had been billed to to discuss his new collection, Autocorrect, in conversation with British writer Daniel Hahn. However the event has now been cancelled. Asked why he'd pulled out, Mr Keret told The Herald: "With the mess my country is currently in I feel there are more urgent issues for me to talk about. It is frustrating but compared to what's going on in my region it feels like discovering a pimple while having a heart attack." Meanwhile the event featuring Anshel Pfeffer, Israel correspondent for the Economist, is going ahead as planned and will look "behind the curtain of Israeli Politics," according to the festival's website. The programme states: "Few writers are better placed than Pfeffer to offer a critical understanding of the political psyche of Israel and the on-the-ground situation for Israelis and Palestinians at this calamitous moment." Read more A spokesperson for Edinburgh International Book Festival said: "The Book Festival has a long history of presenting Palestinian voices and since 2016 has hosted over 60 events directly on Israel and Palestine with sensitivity and care. "At this critical and distressing time, we respect and acknowledge the right of authors to choose which festival programmes to participate in and work with all of our authors to support them to take part.' It is the latest in a string of controversies surrounding the book festival, with some criticising an invitation for former First Minister Nicola Sturgeon and lack of gender critical authors on the line-up. In 2023 climate activist Greta Thunberg was due to appear but pulled out in opposition to the festival's long-standing relationship with Edinburgh-based investment firm Baillie Gifford and its links with the fossil fuels industry. Pressure from climate campaigners to cut ties with Baillie Gifford culminated in organisers ending the partnership last year. They said the festival's board and management had 'collectively agreed' to end the 20-year relationship with its biggest sponsor, while director Jenny Niven said the pressure on her staff had 'simply become intolerable". Edinburgh-based authors Sir Ian Rankin and Jenny Colgan, alongside the Scottish Government and the People's Postcode Lottery, have since stepped in to help plug the funding hole left by the decision. The event, which dates back to 1983, has also attracted new backing from the Edinburgh-based legal firm Digby Brown and additional support from the Hawthornden Foundation, which was set up by the late Drue Heinz, a long-time supporter of Scottish culture who funded a number of literary retreats.
Daily Mail
10-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
'Utterly brilliant': the best short stories out now - Every One Still Here by Liadan Ni Chuinn, Oddbody by Rose Keating, Autocorrect: Stories by Etgar Keret
Every One Still Here by Liadan Ni Chuinn (Granta £14.99, 160pp) Inherited trauma, families, grief and the quiet sorrows of everyday life mark these melancholy, utterly brilliant short stories. It's a remarkable debut, as Ni Chuinn heads into the heart of the characters' lives and sets about a delicate delineation of their most devastating emotions, delivered with tenderness and understanding in prose that is hypnotic and melodic. Take Russia, where an adopted man, mired in unfathomable feelings about his estrangement from his sister, consults a psychic for answers; or the equally impactful We All Go, where a young man is dealing with the death of his father and the legacy of living in Northern Ireland. Oddbody by Rose Keating (Canongate £14.99, 208pp) Rose Keating's debut collection is wonderfully weird, a world where a character can declare, hatchet in hand: 'I could tell you about things that are slick and warm and red, things that are hidden, whispered and wet'. It's very much a mantra for these tales that take ordinary experiences and swerve them into the unexpected. In Squirm, an overwhelmed daughter takes care of her needy dad – who's turned into worm and is living in a compost-filled bath. In the title story the vagaries of a co-dependent relationship are unspooled in all their complexities – but one of the partners is a ghost. Keating successfully marries gorgeous prose to playfully grotesque scenarios. Autocorrect: Stories by Etgar Keret Translated by Jessica Cohen and Sondra Silverstein (Granta £14.99, 208pp) Renowned author Etgar Keret packs some big ideas into his very short stories. Alien space ships, parallel worlds, rogue virtual reality, reincarnation and the afterlife all play their part in disrupting the lives of his down-to-earth characters who are attempting to deal with love, loss, faith and failure in Keret's somewhat surreal settings. Occasionally the tales are too pat, a punchline a little obvious, but the best of these 33 stories are deft and inventive. Keret's droll humour and deadpan delivery add a light touch to the darkest of situations, as seen in Cherry Garcia Memories With M&Ms On Top when a mother with dementia movingly declares to the son she doesn't quite recognise: 'I know that you love me and I love you. Isn't that enough?'
The Guardian
02-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Autocorrect by Etgar Keret review – endlessly inventive short stories
'It's time we acknowledge it: people are not very good at remembering things the way they really happened. If an experience is an article of clothing, then memory is the garment after it's been washed, not according to the instructions, over and over again: the colours fade, the size shrinks, the original, nostalgic scent has long since become the artificial orchid smell of fabric softener. Giyora Shiro, may he rest in peace, was thinking all this while standing in line to get into the next world …' That's quite the opener for a story, isn't it? The apt but just slightly ridiculous metaphor, which is then revealed as not an authorial pronouncement but a character's ruminations. And then we meet the character – excellently specific name – and we find out he's dead, and, in that drolly formulaic aside 'may he rest in peace', we meet the author too. The novelist David Mitchell once said that a common element in great writing, as opposed to merely 'really, really good writing', is a sense of humour. The Israeli writer Etgar Keret's short stories certainly qualify on that count. He's not always or even often trying to make you laugh, but everything he writes is suffused with a wan metaphysical wit: you come to expect the rug-pull, the sad trombone. He's an absurdist, a surrealist, and a writer who revels in the way that in a few paragraphs you can take the reader anywhere. Where some authors will set vast cycles of fiction in a shared universe, Keret does the opposite. Every story is its own universe, and the 200-odd pages of each of his collections are a multiverse. The stories in Autocorrect, his seventh, are gleaming splinters: multum in parvo. He offers yelp-making casual swerves of perspective. 'People, by the way, became extinct a short time later,' we're told halfway through the last paragraph of one story – that flamboyantly casual 'by the way' being very Keretian. In that sense, he resembles the science fiction writer Ted Chiang, with story after story serving as a thought experiment, a parable or a koan, seeded with a big idea. But what he's interested in is how ordinary people, horny or hungry or a little petty, will react in their ordinary ways to the extraordinary. Hence the opening of one story, for instance: 'The world is about to end and I'm eating olives. The original plan was pizza, but …' Or another: 'The aliens' spaceship arrived every Thursday.' In still another, For the Woman Who Has Everything, someone trying to find his wife an original present for her birthday names an asteroid after her – a few hours before that same asteroid is due to obliterate the Earth: 'The birthday card Schliefer bought had a picture of a shooting star, and the caption said 'Make A Wish' in gold letters.' The opening story, A World Without Selfie Sticks, opens with the narrator describing self-reproachingly how he started yelling at a woman he thought was his girlfriend Deborah when he bumped into her in a coffee shop. Only a week previously, he explains, she had supposedly flown to Australia to do her doctorate – and here she was back in town without telling him. Of course he was angry and hurt. It turns out the woman he's yelling at (Not-Deborah, he comes to call her) is a doppelganger from a near-identical alternative universe. She has been sent to our world as part of a top-rated TV gameshow: to win the show (and be zapped home) each of the five contestants must identify 'the one thing that exists in their world but not the one they've been sent to' (the winner of the last series had been sent to a universe without selfie sticks). I shan't spoil the twist, but it's a love story and a philosophical what-if all at the same time. The story that will get most scrutiny, A Dog for a Dog, describes the narrator and his brother heading into the Arabic quarter of an Israeli city for revenge after their dog is killed in a hit-and-run. Transposing Israeli-Palestinian hatred from a policy position to street level, it's a delicately anticlimactic, perfectly balanced vignette, shadowed by violence as well as uneasy complicity in violence and collective punishment. Meanwhile, Strong Opinions on Burning Issues winks at the psychic temper of the times, and Outside refracts the experience of the Covid lockdowns into a surreal little parable. But these are literary responses rather than position statements. (And all but a couple of the stories were written before 7 October.) Politics is mostly absent, in a low-key rebuke to the philistine school of thought that says an Israeli artist should be obliged to make political art. Other stories take us to different versions of the afterlife, or into a simulated reality where the introduction of an 'undo' feature – spill your coffee, you can set the universe back 30 seconds – poses an existential threat. Director's Cut is a real-time biopic of an ordinary man with a 73-year running time; the press screening at once winks at Plato's cave (the only person who doesn't die of old age emerges thinking the film was reality) and Borges's 1-1 scale map. There's a world not that far from our own, where AI companions are proposed to cure loneliness; and one where time travel only takes off when it's rebranded as a weight-loss treatment. Yet for all its vast reach, Keret's prose, translated from Hebrew by Jessica Cohen and Sondra Silverston, is downbeat and matter-of-fact. It's full of people negotiating the bewildering and alienating and bathetic furniture of modernity: Tinder dates, Zoom calls, Skype meetings, virtual reality, small ads, tedious queues, spoiler alerts, unexpected deaths. Autocorrect isn't so much a book as a library of tiny books, from an author who conveys as well as any I can think of just how much fun you can have with a short story. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion Autocorrect by Etgar Keret, translated by Jessica Cohen and Sondra Silverstein, is published by Granta (£14.99). To support the Guardian order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
The Guardian
02-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Autocorrect by Etgar Keret review – endlessly inventive short stories
'It's time we acknowledge it: people are not very good at remembering things the way they really happened. If an experience is an article of clothing, then memory is the garment after it's been washed, not according to the instructions, over and over again: the colours fade, the size shrinks, the original, nostalgic scent has long since become the artificial orchid smell of fabric softener. Giyora Shiro, may he rest in peace, was thinking all this while standing in line to get into the next world …' That's quite the opener for a story, isn't it? The apt but just slightly ridiculous metaphor, which is then revealed as not an authorial pronouncement but a character's ruminations. And then we meet the character – excellently specific name – and we find out he's dead, and, in that drolly formulaic aside 'may he rest in peace', we meet the author too. The novelist David Mitchell once said that a common element in great writing, as opposed to merely 'really, really good writing', is a sense of humour. The Israeli writer Etgar Keret's short stories certainly qualify on that count. He's not always or even often trying to make you laugh, but everything he writes is suffused with a wan metaphysical wit: you come to expect the rug-pull, the sad trombone. He's an absurdist, a surrealist, and a writer who revels in the way that in a few paragraphs you can take the reader anywhere. Where some authors will set vast cycles of fiction in a shared universe, Keret does the opposite. Every story is its own universe, and the 200-odd pages of each of his collections are a multiverse. The stories in Autocorrect, his seventh, are gleaming splinters: multum in parvo. He offers yelp-making casual swerves of perspective. 'People, by the way, became extinct a short time later,' we're told halfway through the last paragraph of one story – that flamboyantly casual 'by the way' being very Keretian. In that sense, he resembles the science fiction writer Ted Chiang, with story after story serving as a thought experiment, a parable or a koan, seeded with a big idea. But what he's interested in is how ordinary people, horny or hungry or a little petty, will react in their ordinary ways to the extraordinary. Hence the opening of one story, for instance: 'The world is about to end and I'm eating olives. The original plan was pizza, but …' Or another: 'The aliens' spaceship arrived every Thursday.' In still another, For the Woman Who Has Everything, someone trying to find his wife an original present for her birthday names an asteroid after her – a few hours before that same asteroid is due to obliterate the Earth: 'The birthday card Schliefer bought had a picture of a shooting star, and the caption said 'Make A Wish' in gold letters.' The opening story, A World Without Selfie Sticks, opens with the narrator describing self-reproachingly how he started yelling at a woman he thought was his girlfriend Deborah when he bumped into her in a coffee shop. Only a week previously, he explains, she had supposedly flown to Australia to do her doctorate – and here she was back in town without telling him. Of course he was angry and hurt. It turns out the woman he's yelling at (Not-Deborah, he comes to call her) is a doppelganger from a near-identical alternative universe. She has been sent to our world as part of a top-rated TV gameshow: to win the show (and be zapped home) each of the five contestants must identify 'the one thing that exists in their world but not the one they've been sent to' (the winner of the last series had been sent to a universe without selfie sticks). I shan't spoil the twist, but it's a love story and a philosophical what-if all at the same time. The story that will get most scrutiny, A Dog for a Dog, describes the narrator and his brother heading into the Arabic quarter of an Israeli city for revenge after their dog is killed in a hit-and-run. Transposing Israeli-Palestinian hatred from a policy position to street level, it's a delicately anticlimactic, perfectly balanced vignette, shadowed by violence as well as uneasy complicity in violence and collective punishment. Meanwhile, Strong Opinions on Burning Issues winks at the psychic temper of the times, and Outside refracts the experience of the Covid lockdowns into a surreal little parable. But these are literary responses rather than position statements. (And all but a couple of the stories were written before 7 October.) Politics is mostly absent, in a low-key rebuke to the philistine school of thought that says an Israeli artist should be obliged to make political art. Other stories take us to different versions of the afterlife, or into a simulated reality where the introduction of an 'undo' feature – spill your coffee, you can set the universe back 30 seconds – poses an existential threat. Director's Cut is a real-time biopic of an ordinary man with a 73-year running time; the press screening at once winks at Plato's cave (the only person who doesn't die of old age emerges thinking the film was reality) and Borges's 1-1 scale map. There's a world not that far from our own, where AI companions are proposed to cure loneliness; and one where time travel only takes off when it's rebranded as a weight-loss treatment. Yet for all its vast reach, Keret's prose, translated from Hebrew by Jessica Cohen and Sondra Silverston, is downbeat and matter-of-fact. It's full of people negotiating the bewildering and alienating and bathetic furniture of modernity: Tinder dates, Zoom calls, Skype meetings, virtual reality, small ads, tedious queues, spoiler alerts, unexpected deaths. Autocorrect isn't so much a book as a library of tiny books, from an author who conveys as well as any I can think of just how much fun you can have with a short story. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion Autocorrect by Etgar Keret, translated by Jessica Cohen and Sondra Silverstein, is published by Granta (£14.99). To support the Guardian order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
