Kaddish.com

Description

Larry is the secular son in a family of Orthodox Brooklyn Jews. When his father dies, it's his responsibility to recite the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, every day for eleven months. To the horror and dismay of his sister, Larry refuses - imperilling the fate of his father's soul. To appease her, Larry hatches an ingenious if cynical plan, hiring a stranger through a website called kaddish.com to recite the prayer and shepherd his father's soul safely to rest. This is Nathan Englander's freshest and funniest work to date - a satire that touches, lightly and with unforgettable humour, on the conflict between religious and secular worlds, and the hypocrisies that run through both.

Nathan Englander is the author of the story collections For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, an international best seller, and What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, and the nov els The Ministry of Special Cases and Dinner at the Center of the Earth. His books have been translated into twenty-two languages. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a PEN/Malamud Award, the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, and the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Let ters, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2013. He is Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University and lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and daughter.

In Englander's hands, storytelling is a transformative act. Put him alongside Singer, Carver, and Munro. Englander is, quite simply, one of the very best we have One of the great voices of our time . . . a true American treasure One of our most consistently brilliant, bold and funny writers What great fiction is all about One of the great voices of our time Among the finest writers of his generation - Sunday Times His writing is liberal in every good sense of the word There is never anything as clumsy as a twist in Englander's stories - just a gradual, deft dismantling of what you thought you knew, or could rely on - New Statesman