Nathan Englander has 6 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 17 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4★ across 4 ratings. The most-rated is For the Relief of Unbearable Urges.
For the Relief of Unbearable Urges
Summary
One of the most stunning literary debuts of our time, these energized, irreverent, and deliciously inventive stories introduced an astonishing talent. In the collection's hilarious title story, a Hasidic man gets a special dispensation from his rabbi to see a prostitute. "The Wig" takes an aging wigmaker and makes her, for a single moment, beautiful. In "The Tumblers", Englander envisions a group of Polish Jews herded toward a train bound for the death camps and, in a deft, imaginative twist, turns them into acrobats tumbling out of harm's way. For the Relief of Unbearable Urges is a work of startling authority and imagination; a collection that is as wondrous and joyful as it is wrenchingly sad. It's the work of a remarkable storyteller.
©1999 Nathan Englander (P)2007 Random House Inc. Random House Audio, a division of Random House Inc.
kaddish.com
Summary
The celebrated Pulitzer finalist and prize-winning author of Dinner at the Center of the Earth and What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank delivers his best work yet, a streamlined comic masterpiece about a son’s failure to say Kaddish for his father. 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 11 months. To the horror and dismay of his sister, Larry refuses - imperiling 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. Sharp, irreverent, hilarious, and wholly irresistible, Englander’s tale of a son who makes a diabolical compromise ingeniously captures the tensions between tradition and modernity - a book to be devoured in a single sitting whose pleasures and provocations will be savored long after.
©2019 Nathan Englander (P)2019 Random House Audio
Dinner at the Center of the Earth
Summary
The best work yet from the Pulitzer finalist and best-selling author of For the Relief of Unbearable Urges - a political thriller that unfolds in the highly charged territory of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and pivots on the complex relationship between a secret prisoner and his guard. A prisoner in a secret cell. The guard who has watched over him a dozen years. An American waitress in Paris. A young Palestinian man in Berlin who strikes up an odd friendship with a wealthy Canadian businessman. And The General, Israel's most controversial leader, who lies dying in a hospital, the only man who knows of the prisoner's existence. From these vastly different lives, Nathan Englander has woven a powerful, intensely suspenseful portrait of a nation riven by insoluble conflict, even as the lives of its citizens become fatefully and inextricably entwined - a political thriller of the highest order that interrogates the anguished, violent division between Israelis and Palestinians and dramatizes the immense moral ambiguities haunting both sides. Who is right, who is wrong - who is the guard, who is truly the prisoner? A tour de force from one of America's most acclaimed voices in contemporary fiction.
©2017 Nathan Englander (P)2017 Random House Audio
What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank
Summary
These eight new stories from the celebrated novelist and short-story writer Nathan Englander display a gifted young author grappling with the great questions of modern life, with a command of language and the imagination that place Englander at the very forefront of contemporary American fiction. The title story, inspired by Raymond Carver’s masterpiece, is a provocative portrait of two marriages in which the Holocaust is played out as a devastating parlor game. In the outlandishly dark “Camp Sundown” vigilante justice is undertaken by a group of geriatric campers in a bucolic summer enclave. “Free Fruit for Young Widows” is a small, sharp study in evil, lovingly told by a father to a son. “Sister Hills” chronicles the history of Israel’s settlements from the eve of the Yom Kippur War through the present, a political fable constructed around the tale of two mothers who strike a terrible bargain to save a child. Marking a return to two of Englander’s classic themes, “Peep Show” and “How We Avenged the Blums” wrestle with sexual longing and ingenuity in the face of adversity and peril. And “Everything I Know About My Family on My Mother’s Side” is suffused with an intimacy and tenderness that break new ground for a writer who seems constantly to be expanding the parameters of what he can achieve in the short form. Beautiful and courageous, funny and achingly sad, Englander’s work is a revelation.
©2012 Nathan Englander (P)2012 Random House Audio
Selected Shorts: Behaving Badly
Summary
The award winning series of classic and contemporary fiction returns with a collection of darkly funny short stories by the likes of Stephen King, Neil Gaiman, Aimee Bender, A.M. Homes, Nathan Englander, Kim, Addonizio, and George Saunders. Readers include Anjelica Huston, Neil Gaiman, Michael Imperioli, Harris Yulin, Christina Pickles, Jefferson Mays, and Christine Ebersole.
©2013 Symphony Space (P)2013 Symphony Space
Thalia Book Club: Nathan Englander, Dinner at the Center of the Earth
Summary
Pulitzer finalist and best-selling author Nathan Englander will be joined by author Mira Jacob (The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing) to discuss his new, "many-splendored" (The New York Times) novel, Dinner at the Center of the Earth, a powerful, riveting story exploring the Israel-Palestine conflict through the lives of a prisoner in a secret cell and the soldier who watched over him for a dozen years. With a performance from the novel by actor Josh Hamilton (13 Reasons Why).
©2017 Symphony Space (P)2017 Symphony Space