“Keret is a brilliant writer . . . completely unlike any writer I know. He is the voice of the next generation.” ―Salman Rushdie
“Keret may be the most important writer working in Israel right now; certainly he is the closest observer of its post-intifada, post-Oslo spiritual condition. And astonishingly, he is also the Israeli writer closest to the literary tradition of pre-Israel, pre- Holocaust European Jewry . . . Kafka said that literature should be an ax to break the frozen sea within us. Keret is a writer whaling at the ice with a Wiffle ball bat.” ―Stephen Marche, The Forward
“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
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The Girl on the Fridge
StoriesBy Etgar KeretFarrar, Straus and Giroux
Copyright © 2008 Etgar Keret
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780374531058
THE GIRL ON THE FRIDGE (Asthma Attack) When you have an asthma attack, you can’t breathe. When you can’t breathe, you can hardly talk. To make a sentence all you get is the air in your lungs. Which isn’t much. Three to six words, if that. You learn the value of words. You rummage through the jumble in your head. Choose the crucial ones—those cost you too. Let healthy people toss out whatever comes to mind, the way you throw out the garbage. When an asthmatic says “I love you,” and when an asthmatic says “I love you madly,” there’s a difference. The difference of a word. A word’s a lot. It could be stop, or inhaler. It could even be ambulance.
THE GIRL ON THE FRIDGE Copyright © 1992, 1994 by Etgar Keret
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Excerpted from The Girl on the Fridge by Etgar Keret Copyright © 2008 by Etgar Keret. Excerpted by permission.
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