[Jewish] Etgar Keret talk and reception April 8th

[rrHACU at hampshire.edu]

PLEASE JOIN US FOR AN INFORMAL RECEPTION BEFORE THE TALK, BEGINNING AT 4:30!

Posen Visiting Writers Series 2009-2010

“The Dark and the Surreal: Israeli Writer and Filmmaker Etgar Keret”
April 8, 2010
5:30 pm
National Yiddish Book Center

This event is sponsored by the Posen Project for the Study of Secular Jewish
History and Culture at Hampshire College and is free and open to the public.
For more information contact Rachel Rubinstein at rrhacu at hampshire.edu

ABOUT ETGAR KERET

“Etgar Keret is a genius...” —New York Times
“Short, strange, funny, deceptively casual in tone and affect, stories that
sound like a joke but aren’t—Etgar Keret is a writer to be taken seriously.”
—Yann Martel
“Keret can do more with six . . . paragraphs than most writers can with 600
pages.” —Kyle Smith, People

Hailed as the voice of young Israel and one of its most radical and
extraordinary writers, Etgar Keret is internationally acclaimed for his short
stories. Born in Tel Aviv in 1967 to an extremely diverse family, his brother
heads an Israeli group that lobbies for the legalization of marijuana, and his
sister is an orthodox Jew and the mother of ten children. Keret regards his
family as a microcosm of Israel. His book, The Nimrod Flip-Out, (Farrar, Straus
& Giroux, 2006), is a collection of 32 short stories that captures the craziness
of life in Israel today. Rarely extending beyond three or four pages, these
stories fuse the banal with the surreal. Shot through with a dark, tragicomic
sensibility and casual, comic-strip violence, he offers a window on a surreal
world that is at once funny and sad.
His books are bestsellers in Israel and have been published in twenty-two
languages. Books include Bus Driver Who Wanted to Be God (2004, St. Martin’s
Press); Missing Kissinger (2007, Chatto & Windus); and Gaza Blues (2004). In
France, Kneller`s Happy Campers is listed as one of the Fnac`s two-hundred
books of the decade, and The Nimrod Flip-Out was published in Francis Ford
Coppola`s magazine, Zoetrope (2004). Keret has received the Book Publishers
Association`s Platinum Prize several times, has been awarded the Prime
Minister`s Prize, and the Ministry of Culture`s Cinema Prize. More than forty
short movies have been based on his stories, one of which won the American MTV
Prize (1998).
As a filmmaker, Keret is the writer of several feature screenplays, including
Skin Deep (1996), which won First Prize at several international film festivals
and was awarded the Israeli Oscar. Wrist Cutters, featuring Tom Waits, was
released in August 2007. Jellyfish, his first movie as a director along with
his wife Shira Geffen, won the coveted Camera d'Or prize for best first feature
at the Cannes Film Festival 2007. The animated feature film $9.99, based on
several of Keret's stories, marries the tradition of Jewish self-flagellating
humor with uncanny absurdity. The film shows us miracles coexisting with the
mundane, and offers a beguiling view of what hope looks like in a hauntingly
fragmented world. Keret, at present, teaches at Ben Guryon University.

About THE GIRL ON THE FRIDGE (2008)
This is a new collection of the stories that made Etgar Keret Israel’s
bestselling and most acclaimed young writer. A birthday-party magician whose
hat tricks end in horror and gore, a girl parented by a major household
appliance, the possessor of the lowest IQ in the Mossad—such are the denizens
of Etgar Keret’s dark and fertile mind. The Girl on the Fridge contains the
best of Keret’s first collections, the ones that made him a household name in
Israel and the major discovery of this last decade.





Rachel Rubinstein
Assistant Professor of American Literature and Jewish Studies
School of Humanities, Arts, and Cultural Studies
Hampshire College
(413) 559-5821