Press

What the critics say

Effortlessly funny... 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

Extremely funny... Keret’s stories understand the plasticity of narrative and the importance of imaginative acts
- The Times

Distinctive, understated and very funny... If you read only one book of short stories this year, it should be this one
- Daily Mail

This bestselling collection by the ingenious and original master of the short story overflows with absurdity, humour, longing and compassion... Keret’s most mature and most playful work yet... One of the great international writers of our time
- GQ

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

Another manifestation of Keret's magic - but more mature, and more interesting
- Haaretz

Crammed with bite-size absurdities.
- Literary Review

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

Keret’s stories understand the plasticity of narrative and the importance of imaginative acts...his essential aim is to uncover the deeper meanings within everyday reality. As a result, his stories walk an unusually thin line between the profound and the inconsequential.
- The Times

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

Keret is exceptionaly fortunate in his translators. His distinctive understated and very funny voice shines through their versions of these stories, which combine realism with the fantasticall, like very sophisticated and poignant modern folk tales... If you read only one book of short stories this year, it shoud be this one.
- Daily Mail

Sneaked in amongst the feints and dodges are sharp insights on the Israeli temperament and steady if glancing attention to the country’s troubles.In digressions and asides, Keret assembles a portrait of his countrymen and their unique and uncomfortable place in the world.
- Times Literary Supplement

While Amos Oz and David Grossman wrestle with the moral quandaries of the emergent Jewish state, and Aharon Appelfield plumbs the calamitous dislocations of Jewish history Mr. Keret tracks the chaotic inner life of his countrymen.To him, the perils of modern Israel – the free-floating rage, the anguish of occupation, the sudden and senseless violence – are not national dramas so much as existential dilemmas.
- International Herald Tribune

Etgar Keret is a master of the short form… The stories are compassionate, insightful and relentlessly absurd
- Vogue