For the Relief of Unbearable Urges: Stories

Energized, irreverent, and deliciously inventive stories from Pulitzer-nominated, bestselling author of What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank.

In the collection's hilarious title story, a Hasidic man gets a special dispensation from his rabbi to see a prostitute. "The Wig" takes an aging wigmaker and makes her, for a single moment, beautiful. In "The Tumblers," Englander envisions a group of Polish Jews herded toward a train bound for the death camps and, in a deft, imaginative twist, turns them into acrobats tumbling out of harm's way.

For the Relief of Unbearable Urges is a work of startling authority and imagination--a book that is as wondrous and joyful as it is wrenchingly sad. It hearalds the arrival of a remarkable new storyteller.

Author: Nathan Englander
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 03/21/2000
Pages: 224
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.51lbs
Size: 8.06h x 5.38w x 0.59d
ISBN: 9780375704437
Award: National Jewish Book Award - Nominee
Award: Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award - Nominee
Award: L.A. Times Book Prize - Nominee
Award: Bard Fiction Prize - Winner

Review Citation(s):
New York Times 04/09/2000 pg. 36

About the Author

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, a winner of the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He is Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at New York University and lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and daughter.