Fly Already

Book excerpt: A brilliant new collection of stories from Etgar Keret, a master of the genre. There’s no one like Etgar Keret. His stories take place at the crossroads of the fantastical, searing, and hilarious. His characters grapple with parenthood and family, war and games, marijuana and cake, memory and love. These stories never go to the expected place, but always surprise, entertain, and move … In ‘Arctic Lizard’, a young boy narrates a post-apocalyptic version of the world where a youth army wages an unending war, rewarded by collecting prizes. A father tries to shield his son from the inevitable in ‘Fly Already’. In ‘One Gram Short’, a guy just wants to get a joint to impress a girl and ends up down a rabbit hole of chaos and heartache. And in the masterpiece ‘Pineapple Crush’, two unlikely people connect through an evening smoke down by the beach, only to have one of them imagine a much deeper relationship. The thread that weaves these pieces together is our inability to communicate, to see so little of the world around us and to understand each other even less. Yet somehow, in these pages, through Etgar’s deep love for humanity and our hapless existence, a bright light shines through and our universal connection to each other sparks alive.