Fiction. Literature. Short Stories. HTML:These eight new stories from the celebrated novelist and short-story writer Nathan Englander display a gifted young author grappling with the great questions of modern life, with a command of language and the imagination that place Englander at the very forefront of contemporary American fiction.
 
The title story, inspired by Raymond Carver�s masterpiece, is a provocative portrait of two marriages in which the Holocaust is played out as a devastating parlor game. In the outlandishly dark �Camp Sundown� vigilante justice is undertaken by a group of geriatric campers in a bucolic summer enclave. �Free Fruit for Young Widows� is a small, sharp study in evil, lovingly told by a father to a son. �Sister Hills� chronicles the history of Israel�s settlements from the eve of the Yom Kippur War through the present, a political fable constructed around the tale of two mothers who strike a terrible bargain to save a child. Marking a return to two of Englander�s classic themes, �Peep Show� and �How We Avenged the Blums� wrestle with sexual longing and ingenuity in the face of adversity and peril. And �Everything I Know About My Family on My Mother�s Side� is suffused with an intimacy and tenderness that break new ground for a writer who seems constantly to be expanding the parameters of what he can achieve in the short form.
 
Beautiful and courageous, funny and achingly sad, Englander�s work is a revelation.