Nathan Englander is the author of the story collections For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, an international bestseller, and What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, and the novels The Ministry of Special Cases and Dinner at the Center of the Earth. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a PEN/Malamud Award, the Frank O’Connor Award, the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts & Letters and was a Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2013. He is Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University. In kaddish.com: A novel (Knopf) the celebrated Pulitzer finalist and prize-winning author delivers a streamlined comic masterpiece about a son’s failure to say Kaddish for his father. Larry is the secular son in a family of Orthodox Brooklyn Jews. When his father dies, it’s his responsibility to recite the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, every day for eleven months. To the horror and dismay of his sister, Larry refuses—imperiling the fate of his father’s soul. To appease her, Larry hatches an ingenious if cynical plan, hiring a stranger through a website called kaddish.com to recite the prayer and shepherd his father’s soul safely to rest. Sharp, irreverent, hilarious, and wholly irresistible, Englander’s tale of a son who makes a diabolical compromise ingeniously captures the tensions between tradition and modernity—a book to be devoured in a single sitting whose pleasures and provocations will be savored long after.
