Keret, Etgar 1967-

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Keret, Etgar 1967-

PERSONAL:

Born August 20, 1967, in Tel Aviv, Israel; married Shira Geffen; children: one child.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Tel Aviv, Israel.

CAREER:

Author, journalist, and filmmaker. Columnist for a weekly newspaper in Jerusalem; comic strip writer for a Tel Aviv, Israel, newspaper; comedy writer for Israeli television; lecturer at Tel Aviv University School of Film. Writer-in-residence, University of Iowa International Writing Program, 2001; participant in Sundance Institute Feature Film Program Screenwriters Lab, 2001. Director and actor, Meduzot, 2007. Military service: Served in the Israeli Army.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Israeli Motion Picture Academy Award for movie Skin Deep; first prize, Alternative Theatre Festival, Acre, Israel, for musical Entebbe; Yediot-Acharonot (Israeli newspaper) selection for the fifty most important books written in Hebrew, for Ga'gu'ai le-Kising'er; prize winner at several international film festivals, including first prize at the Korto Festival in Italy for The Queen of Red Hearts; Cannes Film Festival, Golden Camera Award and the SACD Screenwriting Award, for Meduzot, 2007; Bratislav International Film Festival, Prize of the Ecumenical Jury, and a Special Mention, for Meduzot, 2007; received the (Israel) Book Publishers Association's Platinum Prize several times; Prime Minister's Prize; Cinema Prize, Israeli Ministry of Culture.

WRITINGS:

IN ENGLISH TRANSLATION

Ga'gu'ai le-Kising'er, Zemorah-Bitan (Tel Aviv, Israel), 1994, translated as Missing Kissinger, Chatto & Windus (London, England), 2007.

How to Make a Good Script Great, Actus Tragicus (Tel Aviv, Israel), 1996.

Jetlag, Actus Tragicus (Tel Aviv, Israel), 1998, published in a graphic novel format as Jetlag: Five Graphic Novellas, translated by Dan Ofri, Toby Press (New Milford, CT), 2006.

Selected Stories, Actus Tragicus (Tel Aviv, Israel), 1998.

The Bus Driver Who Wanted to Be God and Other Stories (includes Ha-Kaitanah shel Kneler and selections from Tsinorot and Ga'gu'ai le-Kising'er; also see below), translation by Dalya Bilu and Miriam Shlesinger, Thomas Dunne Books (New York, NY), 2001.

Anihu (short stories), Zemorah-Bitan (Lod, Israel), 2002, translated by Miriam Shlesinger and Sondra Silverston as The Nimrod Flip-out, Chatto and Windus (London, England), 2005, published as The Nimrod Flipout, Farrar, Straus and Giroux (New York, NY), 2006.

Dad Runs away with the Circus (children's fiction), illustrated by Rutu Modan, Candlewick Press (Cambridge, MA), 2004.

(With Samir El-Youssef) Gaza Blues: Different Stories, David Paul (London, England), 2004.

One Last Story and That's It (short stories), translated by Miriam Shlesinger and others, Katha (New Delhi, India), 2005.

The Girl on the Fridge (stories), Farrar (New York, NY), 2008.

IN HEBREW

Tsinorot (short stories; title means "Pipelines"), Am Oved (Tel Aviv, Israel), 1992.

(With Rutu Modan) Lo Banu le-henot (comics; title means "Nobody Said It Was Going to Be Fun"), Keter (Jerusalem, Israel), 1996.

(With Assaf Hanuka) Simta'ot ha-za'am (comics; title means "Streets of Rage"), Zemorah-Bitan (Tel Aviv, Israel), 1997.

Ha-Kaitanah shel Kneler (novella; title means "Kneller's Happy Campers"), Zemorah-Bitan (Tel Aviv, Israel), 1998.

Pizzeria Kamikaze (graphic novel), illustrated by Asaf Hanuka, Kineret, Zemorah-Bitan, Devir (Or Yehudah, Israel), 2004.

Contributor to Tselaliyot: 11 sipurim (stories; title means "Silhouettes: Anthology"), Kineret, Zemorah-Bitan, Devir (Or Yehudah, Israel), 2005. Coauthor, with Jona- than Bar Giora, of Entebbe, a musical play produced in Acre, Israel. Also author of numerous teleplays; writer and director, with Ron Tal, of short movie Skin Deep (also called Malka Red-Heart and Queen of Red Hearts); writer of Meduzot (also known as Jellyfish), with his wife Shira Geffen, 2007. Screenwriter of $9.99, a stop-motion animated film. Keret's writings have been translated into twenty-two languages.

ADAPTATIONS:

Keret's short stories have been adapted as more than forty short films, including one that received an MTV Prize for best animated film in 1998; Kneller's Happy Campers was adapted for a film, Wrist-cutters: A Love Story, Halcyon Pictures, 2006.

SIDELIGHTS:

Etgar Keret is a best-selling author and filmmaker who is especially popular among Israeli young people and often regarded as a spokesman for their generation. Well known for his sardonic and irreverent stories, Keret also pens a newspaper column, comic books, television scripts, and screenplays. Although he has been called "Israel's hippest best-selling young writer today," some Israeli critics have faulted Keret for avoiding political and ideological themes in his work. As Emily Gitter noted in a Forward magazine interview with the author, Keret "disputes the criticism that his stories are simply frivolous." Keret told Gitter: "I think my writing is ideological. But in Israel, when people talk about ideology or morals, they're always talking about politics. And I think there's a lot more to ideology and morals than politics." Keret admitted that he found it difficult to identify with the characters in Israeli literature. "They always seemed better than me—stronger and more charismatic," he told Gitter. The American writers John Cheever, Raymond Carver, and Kurt Vonnegut eventually became the strongest influences on Keret's writing.

The first collection of Keret's stories to be published in the United States is The Bus Driver Who Wanted to Be God and Other Stories, which includes selections from his Tsinorot and Ga'gu'ai le-Kising'er and his novella Ha-Kaitanah shel Kneler. The title story of the collection concerns a bus driver who refuses to open the door to latecomers on the grounds that it delays the schedules of other passengers already on the bus. One man is able to chase the bus down to a stoplight and change the driver's outlook. Benjamin Anastas, writing in the New York Times Book Review, noted that Keret's "impromptu, comic-monologue style works best when he engages larger subjects, as in the title story…. Keret serves us plenty of good laughs, particularly when he targets a monolith." In his assessment for the Bookreporter.com Web site, Rob Cline observed that Keret "has a razorsharp voice barbed with sarcastic wit, surprising turns of phrase … [and] a tremendous imagination that allows him to rethink cultural markers and myths." Booklist reviewer John Green commented, "Keret's stories are brief and powerful linguistic downpours, usually punctuated by uproarious climaxes … smart, insightful, and delightfully hip." Keret's stories "juxtapose a casual realism with regular flashes of unabashed absurdity," wrote a Publishers Weekly reviewer, "portraying characters on the brink of adulthood forced to confront life's chaotic forces—death, justice, love, betrayal—for the first time." André Alexis, reviewing the book for Toronto's Globe and Mail, took exception to "the overly American idiom" of much of the writing, but found it "a work of fiction in which humour, horror, play and irony are as important as ethical concerns…. Keret's characters must deal with the nightmares of the past and the present."

Keret has also turned his hand to writing for children, as in the 2004 title Dad Runs away with the Circus, a "fresh and beguiling domestic fantasy," according to a reviewer for Publishers Weekly, in which a father becomes so enamored with the Big Top that he joins it, leaving his family behind. However, he sends his wife and children postcards from all over the world and then has a most memorable homecoming. The Publishers Weekly reviewer concluded that this was a picture book for all ages: "Even those decades away from a mid-life crisis will likely declare this one a winner." Scott La Counte, writing in School Library Journal, described the same work as "imaginative," while for a Kirkus Reviews critic, "the tale has an offhand charm that suits the offbeat premise."

Also from 2004 is a collaborative effort between Keret and Palestinian author Samir El-Youssef. Gaza Blues: Different Stories is, as Peter Whittaker noted in the New Internationalist, "motivated by a desire to show that literature can bridge political divides." Keret supplied fifteen of his short-short stories for this collection, each of which provides a "glimpse into a surreal world of extreme stress and anxiety," as Whittaker further noted.

With the collection The Nimrod Flipout, Keret received wider recognition in the United States. Writing in People, Kyle Smith called the thirty tales in this book "freaky fables," and went on to observe that the author "can do more with six strange and funny paragraphs than most writers can with 600 pages." These stories continue in the author's minimalist pattern: each one is only several pages long. Forward magazine reviewer Stephen Marche described the tales as "simple, startling conceits executed with diamond-cutting precision." Tikkun reviewer Michael Lukas also noted, "In short, uncanny, and often hilarious bursts, Etgar Keret taps into the profound existential absurdity of being Israeli." The title story concerns three friends who have become obsessed and even haunted with the suicide death of their common friend, Nimrod, from whom they receive an unexpected message via a Ouija board. Other tales blend the quotidian with the surreal. "Baby" is "a haunting tale of love and fidelity," according to Hartford Courant writer Helen Ubinas. "Fatso" was written as a valentine to Keret's girlfriend, but is about a lover who turns into a man. Ubinas found many of these tales "precise, raw and at times, poetic," further calling them stories that "stay with you." Similarly, Hephzibah Anderson, writing in the London Observer, felt the collection "perfectly captures the craziness of life in Israel today." However, Ray Olson, writing in Booklist, was less impressed: "These aren't stories, they're routines!" Olson went on to term the stories "vulgar, sad-sacky stuff, but amusing." Other reviewers had more favorable assessments of The Nimrod Flipout. A Kirkus Reviews critic, for example, called the work a "kaleidoscopic assortment of exact, affecting and richly comic stories," and praised Keret for his "raw, confident and direct" insights and observations. Entertainment Weekly reviewer Anat Rosenberg termed the tales "strangely compelling—or compelling in their strangeness," while a Publishers Weekly contributor found the work "brainteasing" and one that "peels away the borderlines of normalcy."

With Jetlag: Five Graphic Novellas, Keret adapts some of his tales to the graphic novel format, working with artists from an Israeli comics collective. Ranging from a story of a man who goes to the circus and falls in love with a monkey to the tale of a passenger on a jet who is involved in an in-flight flirtation and a pre-arranged crash landing, the pieces in this collection are "brief, surreal fables that set up a witty premise and then end fairly abruptly," according to a Publishers Weekly contributor. Olson, writing in Booklist, noted that Keret "writes about mundane reality invaded by the fantastic" in this collection. Similarly, Rosie Blau writing in the Financial Times felt that Jetlag "adds to the Israeli author's reputation for turning the mundane into a surreal storyline."

Keret's The Girl on the Fridge is a collection of forty-six short stories, each of which ranges from a mere one page to as many as eight. The result is a set of focused, intense narratives that make the most of their brief lengths. Keret engages his readers through a broad range of writing styles, and the resulting works include both humorous and more serious stories. He displays a knack for taking seemingly ordinary narratives and familiar scenes and turning them on end, such as in "Hat Trick," a tale that revolves around a magician who has never aspired to greatness, the standard pulling of the rabbit from his top hat the pinnacle of his performance. So it is with no little irony that Keret depicts the magician as his standard trick, so often anti-climactic, truly becomes the gossip-worthy focus of his act when he manages to pull only the bloody head of a rabbit from the hat one day, instead of the complete animal. In another tale, "Freeze!," a man with the power to stop the world has no further ambition than to use his talents to pick up women. Reviewers found the collection somewhat uneven overall, with some stories standing out more than others. A contributor to Publishers Weekly remarked that the assortment of stories "demonstrates how the same short form that produces ineffective trifles can also create moments of startling power."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, October 15, 2001, John Green, review of The Bus Driver Who Wanted to Be God and Other Stories, p. 382; December 15, 2005, Ray Olson, review of Jetlag: Five Graphic Novellas, p. 32; March 1, 2006, Ray Olson, review of The Nimrod Flipout, p. 65.

Entertainment Weekly, February 10, 2006, review of Jetlag, p. 139; April 7, 2006, Anat Rosenberg, review of The Nimrod Flipout, p. 66.

Financial Times (London, England), February 4, 2006, Rosie Blau, review of Jetlag, p. 33.

Forward, October 26, 2001, Emily Gitter, "Carving a ‘Hip’ Niche in an Epic Land"; May 5, 2006, Stephen Marche, review of The Nimrod Flipout.

Globe and Mail (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), June 15, 2002, André Alexis, "Israel Meets America: The Mythic and the Modern."

Guardian (London, England), March 26, 2005, review of The Nimrod Flipout, p. 26.

Hartford Courant (Hartford, CT), June 25, 2006, Helen Ubinas, review of The Nimrod Flipout.

Kirkus Reviews, August 1, 2001, review of The Bus Driver Who Wanted to Be God and Other Stories, p. 1053; September 1, 2004, review of Dad Runs away with the Circus, p. 868; January 1, 2006, review of The Nimrod Flipout, p. 11.

Metro Times (Detroit, MI), March 6, 2002, Sean Bieri, "When Words Collide."

New Internationalist, November, 2004, Peter Whittaker, review of Gaza Blues: Different Stories, p. 30.

New York Times Book Review, October 28, 2001, Benjamin Anastas, "No Moral, Please," p. 33.

Observer (London, England), February 13, 2005, Hephzibah Anderson, "Parables of Anarchy," p. 16.

People, April 10, 2006, Kyle Smith, review of The Nimrod Flipout, p. 45.

Publishers Weekly, September 17, 2001, review of The Bus Driver Who Wanted to Be God and Other Stories, p. 53; October 25, 2004, review of Dad Runs away with the Circus, p. 47; December 12, 2005, review of Jetlag, p. 44; January 30, 2006, review of The Nimrod Flipout, p. 38; January 21, 2008, review of The Girl on the Fridge, p. 149.

School Library Journal, December, 2004, Scott La Counte, review of Dad Runs away with the Circus, p. 112.

Shofar, summer, 2003, Stacy N. Beckwith, review of The Bus Driver Who Wanted to Be God and Other Stories, p. 166.

Tikkun, September-October, 2005, Ben Naparstek, "Interview with Etgar Keret," p. 70; September-October, 2006, Michael Lukas, review of The Nimrod Flipout, p. 74.

Times Literary Supplement, July 16, 2004, Eleanor Birne, review of Gaza Blues, p. 22; March 25, 2005, Tom Chatfield, "The Clash of Possibilities," p. 22.

Washington Post Book World, June 25, 2006, Alana Newhouse, review of The Nimrod Flipout, p. 15.

World Literature Today, spring, 1999, Yair Mazor, review of Ha-Kaitanah shel Kneler, p. 383; spring, 2002, Leslie Cohen, review of The Bus Driver Who Wanted to Be God and Other Stories, p. 245.