...the written conversation is savagely humorous, integrating satire, sarcasm, and shades of darker universal elements at a dizzying rate. Even better, as a reader, you’re so immersed in Keretworld, that the twist in the tale is particularly more outrageous and unexpected than usual. Fantastical, heart-breaking, laughter-inducing, fabulist, and sometimes just downright wacky, Keret’s writing is palpably imbued with a distinct element of intimacy, as though the author has just invited you into his local café or pub to chat about the state of the world—of our world—over your drink of choice.
Fly Already, Keret’s relaxed yet scintillating new collection of (ultra) short stories, is deeply invested in the problems—often traumas—that impede, alter, and on rare occasions improve relationships ... The humor and sweet irony that permeate Fly Already and most of the other stories in the collection allow Keret to bring his plots to a singularly human resolution. His characters, often suffering quietly from the throb of some deep and hidden (and sometimes bizarre) misery, find small comforts in the company of others, or in brief glimpses of beauty. Often these figures are wonderfully average, slightly clueless men whose troubles have left them directionless and, perhaps counterintuitively, emotionally open. It’s precisely that openness, that low-level hum of receptivity that predisposes them to a kind of quotidian sweetness and light that leaves you with a soft sigh, and maybe even a tear. That’s not to say that the situations Keret builds around his characters are in any sense 'every day.' He is a master conjurer of strange scenarios. But their occasional surreality and frequent absurdity only add to the impression that one is dealing with a deft craftsman ... a collection that actually feels like a book. In its adroit organization, its casual lack of pretentiousness, and its commitment to exploring a handful of prism-like themes through their various aspects, Fly Already comes closer than most to that ideal.
Israeli author Etgar Keret doesn’t just produce memorable short stories but short short stories ... this collection features some of the darkest imagery Keret has brought to print to date ... Keret plays with reality in ways that are reminiscent of Salman Rushdie but also have a splash of Kurt Vonnegut ... In order to enjoy Keret’s stories you have to accept his approach: He cares less about Saki-like revelations, and more about crafting characters that feel like those you know, even if they’re dropped into absurd situations ... Keret teases out humor in the darkest corners of our world, and his stories can have you laughing on one before clamping your throat shut with melancholy by the next. It’s a gift he’s brought to every collection ... Keret has the admirable ability to find the poetry in gritty situations swirling with cannabis smoke and sour regrets. This marriage pulls in readers hungry to learn about the human condition and all its messiness.
A grandmaster of the incongruous, Keret’s flights of fancy range from a dash of fantasy to the outright absurd ... The strongest stories are those that maintain some tether to reality, making the discrepancies between our expectations and the outrageous occurrences concocted by Keret all the funnier. His dips into dystopia...are less compelling. The whimsical scenarios belie a deeper gloom ... Keret has always conveyed an underlying awareness of mortality in his work. But Fly Already displays a particular gravitas: most of its protagonists are grieving, or alienated ... It’s Keret’s particular brand of brilliance that can simultaneously hold tragedy and comedy, and in such compact packages.
Clive James has called [Keret] 'one of the most important writers alive”'– and these 22 tales showcase why. In Keret’s world, whimsy often conceals gut-wrenching wisdom, and heartache usually comes laced with hilarity. If Kafka were reincarnated as a comedy writer in Tel Aviv, his work might look something like this ... The invention in these stories is dazzling: time and again, Keret hits on an idea so good that another writer would turn it into a novel ... Where older Israeli writers such as Amos Oz and David Grossman have railed like prophets against their nation’s sins, Keret mounts his protest in the form of pitch-black satire ... Although the tales are divided between five translators, each captures Keret’s dry, almost clinical style superbly. The book shows a master of the short story pushing against the limits of what the form can achieve ... There’s only one thing Keret is incapable of doing with a story: writing one that’s boring.
Throughout each story, Keret shrewdly and insightfully inhabits the first person of various characters who reside in this alternate reality ... Keret uses our collective cultural memories of atrocities, like the Holocaust, in evocative ways to ask the reader to reflect on how humans tend to categorize different forms of oppression of marginalized peoples by importance based on their heritage ... there is a sense of whimsy that comes through in Keret’s unique and skillfully translated voice ... The stories in Fly Already share just this: human experiences — sometimes intimate, embarrassing, whimsical, and cynical, but always genuine accounts of various expressions of the human condition.
...a hit-or-miss collection from a writer who's quite impressive when he's on his game ... Keret shines when he's gentle and when he gives himself room to explore his characters. This isn't always the case in Fly Already, though. The two-page story 'At Night,' which briefly explores a family in financial trouble, suffers from its brevity and its pointless whimsy — it approaches cleverness, but never quite gets there. The same applies to the metafictional 'Fungus,' about a car crash; it ends with a kind of philosophical navel-gazing that just doesn't rise to the standards he's set for himself in the book's other stories. Keret shines when he's gentle and when he gives himself room to explore his characters. This isn't always the case in Fly Already, though. It also shows one of Keret's main limitations: the more dyspeptic his stories get, the less interesting they are ... Keret at his best is brilliant, though ... ['Pineapple Crush'] is nearly perfect; some of the others in this collection are almost as good. But Fly Already, as a whole, is too uneven — it's a book that feels like a missed opportunity.
The stories of Israeli writer Etgar Keret comprise a kind of magic show, a mystical whirl of light and dark, humor and heartbreak. His new collection, Fly Already, transports us into his quirky yet profound world, shaped by an obsession with the twinned masks of comedy and tragedy reminiscent of writers as varied as George Saunders, Gary Shteyngart, and Isaac Bashevis Singer ... To Keret’s credit, he never brings the Palestinian conflict into full focus, allowing his characters (usually men) to stumble through mishaps of their own making .. Their reversals of fortune are both sudden and moving ... Keret’s ear for the whacky and revelatory is pitch-perfect ... Keret’s stories are not all created equal, but happily the misses are few. Fly Already showcases a writer with a wealth of tricks up his sleeve and a rich, slangy voice, a recognized talent on the global stage who deserves a wider American audience.
Keret uses speech to carry us along. He recognises that dialogue is a kind of duet, a call and response. But again, he uses this idea to anticipate our reactions and upend them, sometimes with tragic consequences ... there are no postmodern bells and whistles attached; nothing fanciful or clever gets in the way of the story itself. And in a world where our headlines read, 'Trump tries to buy Greenland', speculative fiction doesn’t seem so speculative anymore ... This book should be thrust into the hands of any infidel who has ever uttered the words, 'I just don’t like short stories'. It has a completeness and aliveness and dare I say, accessibility, that makes it a great first venture for the uninitiated, and each five pages contain more action than most novels. This is writing characterised by generosity, where being generous doesn’t mean giving too much, but giving just the right amount.
... represents [Keret's] signature style; the stories are absurd, tragic, surreal, and often dramatic, with surprising and shocking twists. While the stories are funny, they all glimpse the profoundness of prosaic human lives ... A reader can gain much — not least, a good laugh — from even a casual reading of the stories in Fly Already. But it is by rereading them a second or a third time, ruminating on each one, that one will find in Keret’s nuanced storytelling its great importance to our times.
... feels very hip and happening ... [Keret's] writing is what is really thrilling in this book. The prose is clever, the tone cool and often funny. The plots twist and turn, full of postmodern trickery ... The revelations and endings of these stories are simply brilliant ... Keret has a terrific turn of phrase ... what makes Keret 'completely unlike any writer'— according to Salman Rushdie — is the way he moves between sadness and menace. He is a master of melancholy, telling of lonely, divorced men, but also of terror. Is the narrator a loser, or is he a psychopath? You read on, nervously, to find out. And then comes the twist.
Keret’s use of first-person point-of-view lessens the distance between reader and character. Most of the stories are in this perspective, each one flowing into the next in a way that they could almost all be about the same person, but for subtle differences. This makes the stories personal, like the characters are speaking directly to the readers, but also universal. When those stories are stripped down, they could happen to anyone of us. As a result, they feel uncomfortably close ... When looking back at the book in hindsight, it feels even more cohesive than when I was initially reading it. Some of the stories flew by while others stuck with me until long after I read them, but all of them made me stop to absorb them completely when I finished them. Fly Already is the type of book whose meaning will change for you depending on where you are in life. Different stories and characters will speak to you and you will take from it what you need. Altogether, I welcome the discomfort that Keret’s stories gave me and I look forward to coming back to it to see what else it can give me.
...quirky, funny, touching, immensely readable, pure pleasure—and though most are very short, they are tightly scripted and satisfyingly complete. Originally written in Hebrew, the pieces in this fine collection lose nothing in translation; the wit and humanity of each tale survive intact. Ideal reading for short bursts of time or short attention spans.
This balance, between nihilism and delight, is the great power of Fly Already. In this sense, it’s a book not just about living in Israel, but about living in the developed world at this terrifying moment in history, during which we will refuse to look at history at all. Keret’s stories are complex and moving; often, they are very funny. In reading them, we all clamber and wheel into the escape room at the end of the universe, eager to ignore the horrors around us, if only for a very determined moment.
It’s difficult to characterize the work of a writer as prodigiously talented as Keret...for whom nothing seems off limits, from the nuances of Jewish-Arab relations in Israel to the late-night concerns of an ambitious goldfish. This smart, strange, completely enthralling collection includes nearly two dozen short stories that span a wide range of topics and tones, from the melancholic aftermath of a suicide jumper to the utterly surreal experience of a clone (or robot, maybe?) alone in a room. If there’s a through line, it’s narrators who get more than they bargained for ... While most of these stories debuted in magazines or on NPR, every one’s worth a revisit, while readers new to Keret will be dazzled.
The Israeli short story writer once again displays his knack for comic, absurd, occasionally dystopian observations ... Keret, who earlier in his career worked more often in flash-fiction mode, benefits from a wider canvas here ... And though Keret has typically eschewed directly addressing tensions in his home country, a number of these stories display the sharp spikes of good political satire ... A handful of pieces have flat jokes or weak concepts, but every piece demonstrates Keret’s admirable effort to play with structure and gleefully refuse to be polite about family, faith, and country. An irreverent storyteller who has yet to run out of social norms to skewer.
Keret...balances gravitas and drollery ... Stories...immediately engage ... The endlessly inventive Keret finds the truth underlying even the simplest human interactions.
