Nathan Englander

Nathan Englander is a bestselling author at the very forefront of contemporary American fiction. Englander’s short fiction has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, and numerous anthologies including The Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and The Pushcart Prize. His story collection For the Relief of Unbearable Urges earned him a PEN/Faulkner Malamud Award and the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Englander’s most recent collection of short stories, What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, published in 2012, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction.

In his stories and his lectures, Englander draws upon his Orthodox Jewish upbringing in West Hempstead, Long Island, as well as his life in Jerusalem that began with vacations in his college years and then a more permanent move he made in 1996, before returning to New York in 2001. His latest book, kaddish.com, is a streamlined comic masterpiece about a son’s failure to say Kaddish for his father.

Englander was selected as one of “20 Writers for the 21st Century” by The New Yorker. He was awarded the Bard Fiction Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and, in 2004, he was a fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. In 2012, his first play, The Twenty-Seventh Man, premiered at the Public Theater and his original translation New American Haggadah (edited by Jonathan Safran Foer) was published to much acclaim. Dinner at the Center of the Earth, published in 2017, centers on the Israeli-Palestine conflict and uses a depiction of the complex relationship between a prisoner and a guard to paint a portrait of a frightened nation where political and moral dilemmas intertwine.