Content

The book is an anthology

Anthology

An anthology is a collection of literary works chosen by the compiler. It may be a collection of poems, short stories, plays, songs, or excerpts...

 of surreal ambiguous and very short stories

Short Stories

Short Stories may refer to:*A plural for Short story*Short Stories , an American pulp magazine published from 1890-1959*Short Stories, a 1954 collection by O. E...

. Each story is no more than couple of pages long, presented in laconic sentences with use of intentionally spare, antiliterary vocabulary. About fifty stories span two hundred and fifty pages. Protagonists are Average Joe

Average Joe

Average Joe is an American reality television show broadcast on the NBC beginning in 2003. There were a total of four seasons, the first two following the original show premise, and the last two bringing back contestants from prior seasons.-Show Premise:...

s " taking impossible things seriously and grave matters lightly". Keret says: "I would call it subjective realism, I am trying to show things the way they feel." Keret explains that his work is influenced by Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka was a culturally influential German-language author of short stories and novels. Contemporary critics and academics, including Vladimir Nabokov, regard Kafka as one of the best writers of the 20th century...

: "Kafka tries to reach his moral goal by disorientating the reader. A short story in this style is like a slap in the face."

Reception

The book was a popular success and considered author's breakthrough creation. The daily newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth

Yedioth Ahronoth

Yedioth Ahronoth is a daily newspaper published in Tel Aviv, Israel. Since the 1970s, it has been the most widely circulated paper in Israel. In a TGI survey comparing the last half of 2009 with the same period in 2008, Yedioth Ahronoth retained the title of most widely read newspaper in Israel...

 named the book as one of the 50 most important works in Hebrew. Stories from this book are now included on the Israeli high school syllabus.

A review of Missing Kissinger by Todd McEwen

Todd McEwen

Todd McEwen is an American writer. A graduate of Columbia University, he has been a resident of Scotland since 1981 and is married to novelist Lucy Ellmann. He has published four novels: Fisher's Hornpipe , McX: A Romance of the Dour , Arithmetic and Who Sleeps with Katz...

 describes Etgar Keret's locale as that of "male confusion, loneliness, blundering, bellowing and, above all, stasis. His narrator is trapped in an angry masculine wistfulness which is awful to behold in its masturbatory disconnection from the world's real possibilities and pleasures." Etgar is "not much of a stylist - you get the impression that he throws three or four of these stories off on the bus to work every morning," and his "wild, blackly inventive pieces...might have been dreamed up by a mad scientist rather than a writer."

External links

• Magic & childhood, by Etgar Keret
  Etgar Keret
  Etgar Keret is an Israeli writer known for his short stories, graphic novels, and scriptwriting for film and television.-Personal Life:Keret was born in Ramat Gan, Israel in 1967. He is a third child to parents who survived the Holocaust. He lives in Tel Aviv with his wife, Shira Geffen, and...
  
  - Three tales of innocence from Israel