The Nimrod Flipout: Stories
Etgar Keret
Language: English
Pages: 167
ISBN: 0374222436
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
From Israel's most popular and acclaimed young writer―"Stories that are short, strange, funny, deceptively casual in tone and affect, stories that sound like a joke but aren't" (Yann Martel, author of Life of Pi)
Already featured on This American Life and Selected Shorts and in Zoetrope: All Story and L.A. Weekly, these short stories include a man who finds equal pleasure in his beautiful girlfriend and the fat, soccer-loving lout she turns into after dark; shrinking parents; a case of impotence cured by a pet terrier; and a pessimistic Middle Eastern talking fish. A bestseller in Israel, The Nimrod Flipout is an extraordinary collection from the preeminent Israeli writer of his generation.
And you hug them and say, no you’re not. You’re not. And if they don’t stop crying all you can do is say shhh. It’s something really terrible, she insists, as if she’s picked up on how nonchalant you are about it, even though you’ve tried to hide it. In the pit of your stomach it may sound terrible, you tell her, but that’s just acoustics. As soon as you let it out it won’t seem anywhere near as bad—you’ll see. And she almost believes you. She hesitates and then she asks: What if I told you that
“Every inch added on to the child is an inch subtracted from the parents.” “And this disease,” Ehud probed, “when does it end?” “End?” The vet tried to camouflage his sorrow behind his thick Argentinean accent. “Only when the parents disappear.” All the way home, Ehud cried and his parents tried to comfort him. Strangely enough, their terrible fate didn’t bother them at all. In fact, they almost seemed to enjoy it. “Lots of parents are dying to sacrifice everything for their children,” his
said, licking her stubby fingers. “We don’t fuck. Not that it’s a big deal or anything. It’s just that, when you’re ‘a fuck on the side’ and the whole sex thing drops out of the equation, then you’re nothing but ‘on the side,’ if you know what I mean. I’m not saying it’s a deal breaker or anything, it’s just, you know, a little weird. Because with your wife, even if you don’t fuck, you can visit her parents or fight about who loads the dishwasher, all the normal couple things. But when it happens
So how about that Dutch babe, didn’t she seem interested?” While the baba was off buying cigarettes, Buddha arrived to visit him, smiling and chubby as always, with the tip of a familiar scar showing on the underside of his potbelly, and Buddha even brought him a present—a wicker basket full of dandelions gone to seed. He blew on one of the dandelions, and the whole world disappeared. FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX 18 West 18th Street, New York 10011 Copyright © 2002, 2006 by Etgar Keret
Postage) Horsie My Girlfriend’s Naked Bottle A Visit to the Cockpit A Thought in the Shape of a Story Gur’s Theory of Boredom The Tits on an Eighteen-Year-Old Bwoken Baby Ironclad Rules A Good-Looking Couple Angle Himme Fatso Surprised? Of course I was surprised. You go out with a girl. First date, second date, a restaurant here, a movie there, always just matinees. You start sleeping together, the sex is mind-blowing, and pretty soon there’s