The Girl on the Fridge Stories

by Keret, Etgar; Shlesinger, Miriam; Silverston, Sondra

• ISBN13: 9780374531058
• ISBN10: 0374531056
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2008-04-15
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Summary

A birthday-party magician whose hat tricks end in horror and gore; a girl parented by a major household appliance; the possessor of the lowest IQ in the Mossadsuch are the denizens of Etgar Keret's dark and fertile mind.The Girl on the Fridgecontains the best of Keret's first collections, the ones that made him a household name in Israel and the major discovery of this last decade. Etgar Keret was born in Tel Aviv in 1967. His stories have been featured onThis American LifeandSelected Shorts. As screenwriters/directors, he and his wife, Shira Geffen, won the 2007 Palme d'Or for Best Debut Feature (Jellyfish) at the Cannes Film Festival. A birthday-party magician whose hat tricks end in horror and gore; a girl parented by a major household appliance; the possessor of the lowest IQ in the Mossadsuch are the denizens of Etgar Keret's dark and fertile mind.The Girl on the Fridgecontains the best of Keret's first collections, the ones that made him a household name in Israel and the major discovery of this last decade. "Keret may be the most important writer working in Israel right now; certainly he is the closest observer of its post-intifada, post-Oslo spiritual condition. And astonishingly, he is also the Israeli writer closest to the literary tradition of pre-Israel, pre-Holocaust European Jewry . . . Kafka said that literature should be an ax to break the frozen sea within us. Keret is a writer wailing at the ice with a Wiffle ball bat."Stephen Marche,The Forward"From the beginning, the most unmistakable aspect of Keret's style has been the length of his stories. Averaging about three pages, each presents a single fully formed incident, often surreal. In one of the stories inThe Girl on the Fridge, a man waiting on the street hears from a passerby that the buses are all dead. When he goes to the central bus station, he sees 'hundreds scattered all over the place, rivulets of fuel oozing out of their disemboweled shells, their shattered innards strewn on the black and silent asphalt.' The story manages to be both whimsical and deeply serious, a flight of fancy built around an image from the very real world of suicide bombings . . . [Keret's stories] present an extraordinary vision, a fresh, original and effective portrait of a society and its beleaguered young men. In three-page bursts, he shows us an Israel no longer filled with pioneers and heroes but with ordinary peoplea view from the ground, as genuine as it is bleak."Joseph Weisberg,The New York Times Book Review "Keret is a brilliant writer . . . completely unlike any writer I know. He is the voice of the next generation."Salman Rushdie "Short, strange, funny, deceptively casual in tone and affect, stories that sound like a joke but aren'tEtgar Keret is a writer to be taken seriously."Yann Martel "Some writers scribble notes on cocktail napkins. Others compose entire literary collections on cocktail napkins. Reading Etgar Keret's new book of 46 very short tales, one suspects that the main criteria for inclusion were that his stories be 1) funny, 2) bizarre and 3) capable of fitting inside the wet, splotchy ring left by a pint glass. Rarely are stories as economical as Keret's, and rarely are economical stories as affecting as these. Keret, an Israeli writer whose work has been featured onThis American LifeandSelected Shorts, explores the nature of violence and alienation from a surreal, whimsical perspective in writings that rarely exceed five pages in length. Even the most impatient reader has time for these quick reads. An especially memorable tal

Author Biography

Etgar Keret was born in Tel Aviv in 1967. His stories have been featured on This American Life and Selected Shorts. As screenwriters/ directors, he and his wife, Shira Geffen, won the 2007 Palme d’Or for Best Debut Feature (Jellyfish) at the Cannes Film Festival.

Table of Contents

Asthma Attack	p. 3
Crazy Glue	p. 5
Loquat	p. 9
Hat Trick	p. 15
An Exclusive	p. 19
Painting	p. 29
Yordan	p. 33
Vacuum Seal	p. 37
Tho Girl on the Fridge	p. 41
World Champion	p. 45
No Politics	p. 49
The Real Winner of tho Preliminary Games	p. 53
Cramps	p. 59
A No-Magician Birthday	p. 61
Through Walls	p. 65
Quanta	p. 69
One Hundred Percent	p. 71
Not Human Beings	p. 75
Freeze!	p. 83
Alternative	p. 87
Without Her	p. 91
Sidewalks	p. 95
Slimy Shlomo Is a Homo	p. 99
Terminal	p. 101
Journey	p. 105
Nothing	p. 109
Myth Milk	p. 111
The Night the Buses Died	p. 113
Moral Something	p. 117
Happy Birthday to You	p. 119
The Backgammon Monster	p. 123
On the Nutritional Value of Dreams	p. 127
Monkey Say, Monkey Do	p. 129
Gulliver in Icelandic	p. 131
Cheerful Colors	p. 135
Goody Bags	p. 137
My Best Friend	p. 141
Boomerang	p. 143
So Good	p. 147
Raising the Bar	p. 151
Vladimir Hussein	p. 153
Knockoff Venus	p. 157
Atonement	p. 161
Patience	p. 163
Gaza Blues	p. 165
The Summer of '76	p. 169
Translation Acknowledgments	p. 173
Table of Contents provided by Blackwell. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

THE GIRL ON THE FRIDGE (Asthma Attack)

When you have an asthma attack, you can’t breathe. When you can’t breathe, you can hardly talk. To make a sentence all you get is the air in your lungs. Which isn’t much. Three to six words, if that. You learn the value of words. You rummage through the jumble in your head. Choose the crucial ones—those cost you too. Let healthy people toss out whatever comes to mind, the way you throw out the garbage. When an asthmatic says “I love you,” and when an asthmatic says “I love you madly,” there’s a difference. The difference of a word. A word’s a lot. It could be stop, or inhaler. It could even be ambulance.

THE GIRL ON THE FRIDGE Copyright © 1992, 1994 by Etgar Keret