“What you do is tell the stories you have, as best you can,” the protagonist’s girlfriend tells him although, almost immediately, she backtracks: “I don’t mean that. “Everything I Know About My Family on My Mother’s Side” is a perfect case in point: Broken into 63 numbered sections, it is a story about the search for a viable story, in which the disconnected pieces come together to make a kind of sense. The triumph of “What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank” is Englander’s ability to balance one against the other, to find, even as he’s calling it unfindable, the deeper story, the more nuanced narrative. “But what do you do,” he (or a character very much like him) asks in a story called “Everything I Know About My Family on My Mother’s Side,” “if you’re American and have no family history and all your most vivid childhood memories are only the plots of sitcoms, if even your dreams, when pieced together, are the snippets of movies that played in your ear while you slept?” And what are those terms? The tension between the religious and the secular, between the American setting of much of this work and the more elusive textures of Jewish life.įor Englander - a self-proclaimed “apostate,” raised in an Orthodox community in Long Island, now living in Brooklyn by way of Jerusalem - this is a defining issue. The title of his new book of short fiction, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank,” draws on two iconic antecedents: the young diarist killed at Bergen-Belsen and the Raymond Carver story “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.” Each, in its way, informs the collection each, in its way, helps to set the terms. Give Nathan Englander credit for chutzpah.

Read the Raymond Carver short story, “ What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” that inspired Englander’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank.What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank.The Guardian calls “Camp Sundown,” one of the stories in What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, “the kind of high-risk story that depends on a very adroit control of tone to keep it from capsizing into tasteless silliness or kitschy solemnity.”.“What Englander is saying is that we know ourselves, or don’t, on different levels, that we exist individually and as part of a heritage,” writes the Los Angeles Times in its review of What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank.Englander manages to delineate extreme behavior with a combination of psychological insight, allegorical gravity and sometimes uproarious comedy,” writes Michiko Kakutani in this New York Times review of What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank. What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank.Celebrating 50 Years of Coeducation at Colgate.

What we talk about anne frank