The Seven Good Years | Granta

  • Published: 05/05/2016
  • ISBN: 9781783780471
  • 129x20mm
  • 192 pages

The Seven Good Years

Etgar Keret

Translated by Sondra Silverston, Miriam Shlesinger

Over the last seven years Etgar Keret has had plenty of reasons to worry. His son, Lev, was born in the middle of a terrorist attack in Tel Aviv. His father became ill. And he has been constantly tormented by nightmarish visions of the Iranian president Ahmadinejad, anti-Semitic remarks both real and imagined, and, perhaps most worrisome of all, a dogged telemarketer who seems likely to chase him to the grave. Emerging from these darkly absurd circumstances is a series of funny, tender ruminations on everything from his three-year-old son’s impending military service to the terrorist mindset behind Angry Birds.

Moving deftly between the personal and the political, the playful and the profound, The Seven Good Years takes a life-affirming look at the human need to find good in the least likely places, and the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of our capricious world.

Comic, surreal and disorientating... Close in spirit to Woody Allen, these 36 pin-sharp snapshots of life temper nervous comedy with aching tenderness

Boyd Tonkin, Independent

I am very happy that Etgar and his work are in the world, making things better

George Saunders

The work of a writer coming to maturity... comic [and] self-deprecating

Alice O’Keefe, Guardian

The Author

Born in Tel Aviv in 1967, ETGAR KERET is a leading voice in Israeli literature and cinema. He is the author of five bestselling story collections, which have been translated into 46 languages. His writing has been published in the New York Times, Le Monde, the Guardian, the New Yorker, the Paris Review and Esquire. He has also written a number of screenplays, and Jellyfish, his first film as a director alongside his wife Shira Geffen, won the Caméra d’Or prize for best first feature at Cannes in 2007. In 2010 he was awarded the Chevalier medallion of France’s Order of Arts and Letters, and in 2016 he won the Bronfman Prize. His memoir The Seven Good Years was published by Granta in 2015. www.etgarkeret.com

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The Translator

Sondra Silverston is a native New Yorker who has lived in Israel since 1970. She has translated works by Amos Oz, Etgar Keret and Eshkol Nevo. Her translation of Amos Oz’s Between Friends won the 2013 National Jewish Book Award for fiction.

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From the Same Author

Fly Already

Etgar Keret, translated by Sondra Silverston,Jessica Cohen,Miriam Shlesinger,Nathan Englander,Yardenne Greenspan

Winner of the 2018 Sapir Prize.

You need to bribe someone into giving you weed? Don’t worry, just step into this court room and call the defendant a murderer. You’re a rich, lonely man and you want the joy of company? Don’t worry, just buy up people’s birthdays, and you’ll have friends calling every day. You need to get girls into bed? Don’t worry, your writer friend will write you a very persuasive story. You’re standing on the edge of a very high building, with all of your wretched sorrows? Don’t worry, fly already!

In these 22 short stories, wild capers reveal painful emotional truths, and the bizarre is just another name for the familiar. Wickedly funny and thrillingly smart, Fly Already is a collage of absurdity, despair and love, written by veteran commentator on the circus farce that is life.

Etgar Keret on Granta.com

Essays & Memoir | The Online Edition

Israel in 600 Words or Less

Etgar Keret

‘My mind contains a lot of good answers to bad questions’

Etgar Keret on the impossibility of representing a nation.

In Conversation | The Online Edition

Etgar Keret | Interview

Etgar Keret & Sophie Lewis

‘Usually my wife makes fun of me.’

Fiction | The Online Edition

Car Concentrate

Etgar Keret

‘Women mostly touch it tentatively with the backs of their hands.’