Nathan Englander Reading

Weaving together vastly different lives–a prisoner in a secret cell. The guard who has watched over him for a dozen years. An American waitress in Paris. A young Palestinian man in Berlin. And the General, Israel’s most controversial leader. Nathan Englander has crafted a powerful, intensely suspenseful portrait of a nation riven by insoluble conflict, even as the lives of its citizens become fatefully and inextricably entwined. A political thriller of the highest order that interrogates the anguished, violent division between Israelis and Palestinians and dramatizes the immense moral ambiguities haunting both sides, Dinner at the Center of the Earth is a tour de force novel from one of the most acclaimed voices in contemporary American fiction.

Nathan Englander is the author of the novel The Ministry of Special Cases, and the story collections For the Relief of Unbearable Urges and What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, winner of the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award and finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His short fiction has been widely anthologized, most recently in 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories. Englander’s play The Twenty-Seventh Man premiered at The Public Theater in 2012. He also translated the New American Haggadah and co-translated Etgar Keret’s Suddenly a Knock on the Door. He is distinguished writer-in-residence at New York University, and lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and daughter.