Suddenly, a Knock on the Door

Born in Tel Aviv in 1967, Etgar Keret is one of the leading voices in Israeli literature and cinema. He is the author of five bestselling collections, which have been translated into twenty-nine languages. His writing has been published in the New York Times, le Monde, the Guardian, the Paris Review and Zoetrope. He has also written a number of award-winning screenplays, and Jellyfish, the first film that he directed -along with his wife Shira Geffen - won the Camera d'Or prize for best first feature at Cannes in 2007. In 2010 he was awarded the Chevalier medallion of France's Order of Arts and Letters.

"Etgar Keret has written several great books, but this is his greatest. These stories are the most funny, dark and poignant I've read in a long time. It's tempting to say they are his most Kafkaesque, but in fact they are his most Keretesque" Jonathan Safran Foer "Distinctive, understated and very funny... If you read only one book of short stories this year, it should be this one" Daily Mail "Etgar Keret is a great short story writer whose work is all the greater because it's funny...The stories are all thought-experiments. What if, they ask. Why not? And, what the heck? Like all art, they are highly patterned, highly charged, refracted reflections on the chaos and randomness of everyday existence" Guardian "A maddening, abruptly moving and effortlessly funny collection ... Clever, relevant and oddly resonant, Suddenly a Knock on the Door is Keret's best, most mature work and the perfect introduction to his sad, strange and moving fiction" Independent "At once sophisticated and anti-literary, extremely funny and slyly serious. While invariably set in contemporary Israel, and full of sex and violence, they also hark back to older storytelling traditions such as the parable, the folk tale and the absurdist fiction of Gogol and Kafka" Observer