Suddenly, a Knock on the Door: Stories
Written by Etgar Keret
Narrated by Ira Glass and Willem Dafoe
4/5
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About this audiobook
Bringing up a child, lying to the boss, placing an order in a fast-food restaurant: in Etgar Keret's new collection, daily life is complicated, dangerous, and full of yearning. In his most playful and most mature work yet, the living and the dead, silent children and talking animals, dreams and waking life coexist in an uneasy world. Overflowing with absurdity, humor, sadness, and compassion, the tales in Suddenly, a Knock on the Door establish Etgar Keret—declared a "genius" by The New York Times—as one of the most original writers of his generation.
Etgar Keret
Etgar Keret was born in Tel Aviv in 1967. His stories have been featured on This American Life and Selected Shorts. As screenwriters/ directors, he and his wife, Shira Geffen, won the 2007 Palme d’Or for Best Debut Feature (Jellyfish) at the Cannes Film Festival. His books include The Nimrod Flipout and Suddenly, a Knock on the Door.
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Reviews for Suddenly, a Knock on the Door
150 ratings14 reviews
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5This guy has great ideas. One of his stories became the movie Wristcutters. His writing is very simple and some of his stories are really just story fragments.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Once again, I struggle with how to review a short story collection. Favorites:"Suddenly, a Knock on the Door" "Unzipping""Pick a Color""Bitch""Bad Karma""What, of this Goldfish, Would You Wish?"-- My favorite, about a magical wish-granting goldfish."One Step Beyond" These stories are ultra-short, and often surreal. Overall, I feel this is an uneven short story collection: some stories are very good, however, a lot are only so-so.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Especially fantastic collection as an audiobook. I have no idea how Keret assembled such an all star cast. Every story has a twist and all of them seem to work.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This is my favorite short story collection of all time. Most stories are only three or so pages, and, combined, they had me crying at times and laughing out loud at other times. What spectacular wit, range, power, and imagination.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I listened to the audio version of this book of short stories and loved that they were read by many authors and actors. Some stories were truly phenomenal while others were just okay.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5This collection of quirky short stories deals with a lot of relatable aspects of modern day life and romance. Some of the stories are moderately entertaining, others are excessively prurient, and most are good but not great. With Ira Glass narrating a couple of stories this sounds like a middling episode of This American Life (This Israeli Life?). The magical realism aspects are fun but mostly I was slightly charmed rather than overwon by these stories.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The book is not good. The book is not bad. The book is not my taste.
If you read a book like you're going to a museum to see paintings framed on the wall, but when you get to the exhibition it's just pencil sketches on napkins or Steno pads, that's what these stories are like.
Seems like he's jotting down ideas but doesn't really put the work in to bother with the filling in and filling out of the pictures.
I'm really not at all sure why this work is so highly rated. - Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Wow, what a ride! Loved it.
Wildly inventive. It's like literary Silly Putty that's been smushed up against color comics, peeled off and then stretched and pulled. It kind of looks the same as the real thing but is weirdly distorted. In a way that is more interesting and alive than the original.
And then it makes you smile. - Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Etgar Keret’s short stories are very short – the longest ones are around ~10 pages. They usually have some bizarre, metafictional or fantastical elements and are a quick read. I’d previously read another collection, The Nimrod Flipout, and enjoyed that one although I don’t think any of the individual stories stuck with me. This collection was similarly fun and the stories flew by, although there were some that seemed pointless and others relied on random twists at the end.I liked the more metafictional stories about writers – the first one “Suddenly, a Knock on the Door”, where the author-narrator is forced to come up with stories; “The Story, Victorious” – a bit Calvino-esque; “Creative Writing”, where stories from a writing workshop reflect a troubled relationship; and “What Animal Are You” which shows a writer pretending to write for a picture. A number of stories find various sad loners, widows and widowers or single fathers in absurd or unreal situations. “Cheesus Christ” moves through a series of people with fleeting connections, showing their sad lives and problems. Two soldiers come to inform a woman that her husband “Simyon” is dead, but there’s a problem: she’s not married. This one had a nice twist – good for such a short story. In “Healthy Start” a lonely man pretends to be whoever it is that random people at a diner are looking for. A hopelessly in love man imagines parallel worlds where he is happy in “Parallel Universes.” There are many very short stories in this collection and of course not all of them work. “Pick a Color” about people of differing colors interacting, is rather simplistic; “Grab the Cuckoo by the Tail”, about a recently dumped man and his annoying friend doesn’t quite hit the mark. Despite the fantastic nature of some of the stories, they are firmly grounded in the everyday and illuminate the ironies, absurdities, and sadness of ordinary life.I don’t know that any of these stories are going to stick with me, but it was a good read and I kept wanting more.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5A collection of short stories, with usual the Etgar Keret themes: the surrealism of living in Israel, suicide, alternative personal histories and women who disappear out of your life. Not as good as (or maybe less of a surprise than) the first book of his that I read (Happy Campers), but still a very enjoyable and wistful read.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5As someone who writes for a living, Keret’s way to dish out ideas by the dozen is borderline annoying: “Here’s a great concept which gets three pages, here’s a clever idea which gets, um, four and a half”. He uses exactly as much text as he needs to to present each story, and not a line more: an angel is faced with someone who actually wishes for world peace with his dying breath. A man wakes up from a coma, and can’t find a way to explain to his wife how much more wonderful it was than being awake. And three distant business acquaintances find themselves the only guests at a birthday party – and the birthday boy seems to have gone missing. A contract killer finds Hell is very different than he thought.Some stories here are more everyday, borderline realistic, than I’ve read from Keret before. The blend in this book seems eclectic and all over the place, but somehow also works fantastically as a whole. Most impressive of all is that Keret isn’t just about the clever idea and the cool twist. He also manages to conjure interesting, relatable characters and say something about life in contemporary Israel. This is truly a big bag of delicious nibbles. Great, great, great stuff.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I was surprised on how quickly Suddenly, a Knock on the Door pulled me in. I only said that I would only read the first story which shares its name with the title and I wound up read the first 80 pages. Keret's short stories are so captivating, quirky, weird, hilarious, and compelling that it is extremely hard to to stop reading.
Since Keret, I am assuming, is an Israeli author, his stories were translated by three different people. My favorites were "Suddenly, a Knock on the Door,""Lieland,""Cheesus Christ,""The Polite Little Boy,""One Step Beyond," and "Parallel Universes."
I definitely want to read more from this author. - Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5it takes a moment to get used to this kind of humor, but once yiu are in the mood for it, it is pretty funny or weird or corky. but then again half way through it turned too corky for me and i lost interest.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5As usual (this is Keret after all), here is a collection of stories of the sometimes surreal, the sometimes bizarre, the sometimes humdrum, all with an insight into something much bigger than expected. Stories like the one about a lonesome Russian with a magic goldfish, a dead wife reincarnated in a French Poodle, and a girl who unzips her boyfriend and finds a completely different man inside are not uncommon to Keret, they are indeed to be expected, but there is always that other side, the human side, to the madness - Keret is an absolute master at seeing the world in a grain of sand and this new collection is only more proof of the same brilliance.