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NEXTBOOK FEATURE
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LISTENING BOOTH
Beach Reading
Hear streaming audio of three short stories by Israeli writer Etgar Keret as well as excerpts from his recent conversation with Ira Glass.
Text by Sara Ivry
"I started writing stories because it was a retreat from life," says Etgar Keret, who takes cues from Kafka, Gogol, and Raymond Carver in his short stories. Nextbook invited Keret to Chicago's Abbey Pub to speak with Ira Glass, host of This American Life, about his heroes, his style, and why the beach looms so large both in his life and his fiction.
 Though called quirky and irreverent, Keret laughs at the labels sometimes ascribed to him. When his first collection came out in Hebrew, the publisher promoted him as Israel's hippest young writer. "Listen, I don't know a lot about PR but Israel's hippest young writer is like Germany's best dressed man, you know?" he tells Glass. "There is a very strong need to define you—they want to say, 'He's like the Mideastern, I don't know, Eugene O'Neill on a skateboard on a very rainy day.'"
Keret's father, a Holocaust survivor, asked his son after reading his work, "'In all your stories, all the parents are either stupid or dead, so is there something that you're trying to tell me?'" Parents in Keret's stories are archetypes representing the inanity that surrounds us, the author explains. "When I was a three or four year old, and I would get hit very hard or suffer any pain, I would never cry because I would say, you know, I shouldn't. What is it? It's nothing compared to what my parents have been through, and I didn't want to make them sad."
"What does the beach mean to you?" asks Glass, noting that many of Keret's tales feature two buddies at the seaside. Keret, who lives in Tel Aviv, goes to the ocean five times a week, at least. "It's very good for very egocentric, hysterical people, you know, to look at the sea and say, 'I'm part of a world and it's a big world.' I can't imagine living anywhere far away from the sea."
Sara Ivry is associate editor of Nextbook.org.
Ira Glass photo: © 2001 Richard Frank, Etgar Keret photo: © Lihi Lapid
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