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NATHAN ENGLANDER
Nathan Englander has quickly become one of the most talked
about new voices in literature. At the age of 28, his debut story collection, For
the Relief of Unbearable Urges, was released to extraordinary reviews from
both critics and fellow writers. Ann Beattie wrote, “Every so often there’s
a new voice that entirely revitalizes the short story . . . It’s happening
again with Nathan Englander . . . It’s the best story collection I’ve read
in ages.” Drawing comparisons to such greats as Isaac Bashevis Singer, Bernard
Malamud, and Philip Roth, Englander writes with a compassion and wisdom that belie
his youth. His joyful, yet wrenchingly sad stories reveal human nature through
the lens of Orthodox Judaism, a religious tradition with which he is intimately
familiar.
Englander grew up in a strictly Orthodox home and neighborhood on Long Island,
New York. He studied at a yeshiva through his high school years and observed all
religious rules and traditions. It was expected that he would continue his
Orthodox education, but instead, he insisted on entering the State University of
New York at Binghamton where he pursued a liberal arts education. Englander
spent a life-changing junior year abroad in Jerusalem. There he abandoned his
Orthodox faith, immersed himself in literature and began to discover himself as
a writer. When he returned to the States, he continued writing and later
graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
While the stories in For the Relief of Unbearable Urges invite readers
into the world of Hasidic and Orthodox Jews, they also explore universal themes
of love, fear, identity, vanity, and shame. Englander’s characters face and
sometimes overcome spiritual, moral, and sexual crises in settings as diverse as
Russia, Israel, and Brooklyn. In one story, a group of Jews doomed for a Nazi
death camp accidentally boards a train of circus performers and saves themselves
by impersonating acrobats. In the book’s hilarious title story, a Hasidic man
gets special dispensation from his rabbi to see a prostitute. Through these
powerfully inventive, often haunting stories, For the Relief of Unbearable
Urges reveals Englander as a truly gifted and original storyteller.
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