Listen
Considered one of the masters of the short story form, Nathan Englander offers fiction that is both edgy and timeless. His new collection, the title of which is inspired by Raymond Carver’s masterpiece on love, grapples with some of today’s questions with great care. As Jonathan Lethem praises, “Englander’s elegant, inquisitive, and hilarious fictions are a working definition of what the modern short story can do.”
Nathan Englander is the author of the novel The Ministry of Special Cases and the story collection For the Relief of Unbearable Urges,, which earned him a PEN/Malamud Award and the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic,and numerous anthologies, including The Best American Short Storiesand The O. Henry Prize Stories.
David L. Ulin is the book critic for the Los Angeles Times and, from 2005-2010, was the paper's book editor. He is the author of The Lost Art of Reading: Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time and The Myth of Solid Ground: Earthquakes, Prediction, and the Fault Line Between Reason and Faith, and the editor of Another City: Writing from Los Angeles and Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology, which won a 2002 California Book Award. His essays and criticism have appeared in many publications.