Energized, irreverent, and deliciously inventive stories from Pulitzer-nominated, bestselling author of What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank. 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 book that is as wondrous and joyful as it is wrenchingly sad. It hearalds the arrival of a remarkable new storyteller.

Acclaimed as an astonishing debut, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges is a collection of nine delightfully irreverent stories that range from Stalin's Russia to contemporary New York. Wise and compassionate, outrageous and wrenchingly sad, they place Nathan Englander firmly in the company of Bellow, Malamud, Singer and Roth.

The setting is a Soviet prison, 1952. Joseph Stalin's secret police have rounded up twenty-six writers, the giants of Yiddish literature in Russia. As judgment looms, a twenty-seventh suddenly appears: Pinchas Pelovits, unpublished and unknown. Baffled by his arrest, he and his cellmates wrestle with the mysteries of party loyalty and politics, culture and identity, and with what it means to write in troubled times. When they discover why the twenty-seventh man is among them, the writers come to realize that even in the face of tyranny, stories still have the power to transcend. In his last act of storytelling, Pelovits asks us: Who writes the eulogy when all the writers are gone?

From its unforgettable opening scene in the darkness of a forgotten cemetery in Buenos Aires, the debut novel from the Pulitzer-nominated, bestselling author of For the Relief of Unbearable Urges casts a powerful spell. In the heart of Argentina's Dirty War, Kaddish Poznan struggles with a son who won't accept him; strives for a wife who forever saves him; and spends his nights protecting the good name of a community that denies his existence. When the nightmare of the disappeared children brings the Poznan family to its knees, they are thrust into the unyielding corridors of the Ministry of Special Cases, a terrifying, byzantine refuge of last resort. Through the devastation of a single family, Englander brilliantly captures the grief of a nation.

From the Pulitzer-nominated, bestselling author of For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, eight powerful stories, dazzling in their display of language and imagination. “Showcases Mr. Englander’s extraordinary gifts as a writer.” —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times From the title story, a provocative portrait of two marriages inspired by Raymond Carver’s masterpiece, to “Peep Show” and “How We Avenged the Blums,” two stories that return to the author’s classic themes of sexual longing and ingenuity in the face of adversity, these stories affirm Nathan Englander’s place at the very forefront of contemporary American fiction.

A political thriller set against the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, from the Pulitzer-nominated, bestselling author of For the Relief of Unbearable Urges. A Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year “Blends elements of spy thriller and love story, magical realism, and an all-too-real history of one of the world’s most intractable problems: peace between Israel and its neighbors." —The Boston Globe In the Negev desert, a nameless prisoner languishes in a secret cell, his only companion the guard who has watched over him for a dozen years. Meanwhile, the prisoner’s arch nemesis—The General, Israel’s most controversial leader—lies dying in a hospital bed. From Israel and Gaza to Paris, Italy, and America, Englander provides a kaleidoscopic view of the prisoner’s unlikely journey to his cell. Dinner at the Center of the Earth is a tour de force—a powerful, wryly funny, intensely suspenseful portrait of a nation riven by insoluble conflict, and the man who improbably lands at the center of it all.

This book is certain to appeal to the millions of Jewish women interested in Jewish literature and the writings of Cynthia Ozick, Francine Prose, and Grace Paley. Beautifully packaged, it is an ideal Mother's Day or Bat-Mitzvah gift. This volume contains translations of Yiddish stories from eminent scholars--including an Isaac Bashevis Singer story that has never before been published in English--and well-known tales that Jewish readers everywhere love. As bestsellers such as Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer and For the Relief of Unbearable Urges by Nathan Englander have demonstrated, there is a strong interest in Jewish stories. Yiddish culture and music have seen a resurgence in recent years. NPR's All Things Considered aired a series of highly acclaimed documentaries about the Yiddish Radio Project and Klezmer musicians regularly play at top alternative venues.

Jonathan Safran Foer's and Nathan Englander's spectacular Haggadah-now in paperback. Upon hardcover publication, NEW AMERICAN HAGGADAH was praised as a momentous re-envisioning through prayer, song, and ritual of one of our oldest, most timeless, and sacred stories-Moses leading the ancient Israelites out of slavery in Egypt to wander the desert for 40 years before reaching the Promised Land. Featuring a new translation of the traditional text by Nathan Englander and provocative essays by a collection of major Jewish writers and thinkers, it was received not only as a religious document but a magnificent literary and artistic achievement. Now, after two years of patience, those readers who asked for a paperback edition have gotten their wish.

Winner of the PEN/Malamud Award: “The genius of his stories is to render his fictional world as timeless.”—Colm Tóibín The sixteen exquisitely crafted stories in Island prove Alistair MacLeod to be a master. Quietly, precisely, he has created a body of work that is among the greatest to appear in English in the last fifty years. A book-besotted patriarch releases his only son from the obligations of the sea. A father provokes his young son to violence when he reluctantly sells the family horse. A passionate girl who grows up on a nearly deserted island turns into an ever-wistful woman when her one true love is felled by a logging accident. A dying young man listens to his grandmother play the old Gaelic songs on her ancient violin as they both fend off the inevitable. The events that propel MacLeod's stories convince us of the importance of tradition, the beauty of the landscape, and the necessity of memory.

The most celebrated story collection from “one of the true American masters” (The New York Review of Books)—a haunting meditation on love, loss, and companionship, and finding one’s way through the dark that includes the iconic and much-referenced title story featured in the Academy Award-winning film Birdman. "Raymond Carver's America is ... clouded by pain and the loss of dreams, but it is not as fragile as it looks. It is a place of survivors and a place of stories.... [Carver] has done what many of the most gifted writers fail to do: He has invented a country of his own, like no other except that very world, as Wordsworth said, which is the world to all of us." —The New York Times Book Review