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| The Nimrod Flipout: Stories | 
 enlarge | Authors: Etgar Keret, Institute For Translation Of Hebrew Literature
Creators: Miriam Shlesinger, Sondra Silverston
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Category: Book
List Price: $12.00
Buy New: $6.79
You Save: $5.21 (43%)
Buy New/Used from $5.50
Avg. Customer Rating:  (9 reviews)
Sales Rank: 37920
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1st
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 167
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 8.2 x 5.4 x 0.6
ISBN: 0374222436
Dewey Decimal Number: 892.436
EAN: 9780374222437
ASIN: 0374222436
Publication Date: April 4, 2006
Release Date: April 4, 2006
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
From Israel?s most popular and acclaimed young writer??Stories that are short, strange, funny, deceptively casual in tone and affect, stories that sound like a joke but aren?t? (Yann Martel, author of Life of Pi)
Already featured on This American Life and Selected Shorts and in Zoetrope: All Story and L.A. Weekly, these short stories include a man who finds equal pleasure in his beautiful girlfriend and the fat, soccer-loving lout she turns into after dark; shrinking parents; a case of impotence cured by a pet terrier; and a pessimistic Middle Eastern talking fish. A bestseller in Israel, The Nimrod Flipout is an extraordinary collection from the preeminent Israeli writer of his generation.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 4 more reviews...
A Style All His Own August 4, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Etgar Keret is nothing more (or less) than the Etgar Keret of Israeli literature. His style in many ways is unique and should be read with no one else in mind. Like many Israelis, he lives life with a cynical approach that is very much like 'gallows' humor. This derives from the birth pangs of Israel, the elegiac weight of the Shoah (Holocaust) and the knowledge of being surrounded by 160 million people who want you gone and dead.
Spend any time in Israel or with Israelis and you will understand a little more the eccentricities of Keret's stories. Especially touching and revealing is his discussions of being part of the Israeli Defense Force (IDF). Most of his comments about life in the IDF are sidebars to the actual story he is telling, but they are not 'throw-away' comments.
His stories wander all around the spectrum, though many are 'train of thought' or just 'I was thinking about...'. His take on what makes a relationship would bring one to think that he hasn't been very successful and doesn't think he ever will be.
My favorite was "$9.99 plus tax and shipping". The story itself could be too 'cutsie' but the ending is pure Keret.
Zeb Kantrowitz (and I approved this review)
 An Israeli Woody Allen July 20, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Any reader tickled by the early stories of Woody Allen - the one about the moose at a costume party comes to mind - will delight in these stories. They are witty and poignant in unexpected ways, rambling sometimes like a conversation with an underachieving friend you knew in middle school who with the sensibilities of a 14-year-old has had adulthood thrust upon him.
Making meaning of it all, when life was supposed to be simple, is a task that leads his narrators in a hundred circuitous ways to incomprehension - and who wouldn't be puzzled by some of these developments, e.g. a beautiful woman who turns into a hairy man at night, parents who shrink until they fit into a shirt pocket, and so on. Meanwhile, as readers, we look on like witnesses to complications that have all the oddball requirements for an appearance before Judge Judy. Someone expecting "Anna Karenina" will no doubt be disappointed by these quirky, magical, sometimes disturbing, and often heart-rending stories. But if philosophical delight at life's absurdities is something of a tonic for you, you won't be disappointed in Keret's imaginative world.
Sometimes brilliant. Other times not. April 25, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
This book is a bit of a grab bag. It's a jumble of great and not-so-great stories, and you take what you get.
Some of the stories are absolutely fantastic, creative, evocative, and perfectly told. Often, these excellent stories elicited strong reactions from me, or made me smile at their strange, wonderful, and twisted genius. The first story of the book, "Fatso," is such a gem of a story (in structure, in its strangeness, in style, in images, in character, in a surprising dose of magical realism) that, in addition to reading it four or five times, I'm also going to photocopy it, and send it to two friends. I think they'll find it excellent as well.
Other stories are not nearly as good.
But, after reading several of the other Amazon reviews of this book, I wonder: perhaps all of the stories are incredible, and some just appeal to different kinds of people from others. Several reviewers and readers seem to agree that this book has some excellent and some not-so-excellent stories, but do they all agree about which are which? I saw that at least one reviewer really appreciated the book's title story "The Nimrod Flipout." But this was one of the stories with which I was thoroughly UN-impressed. It didn't move or excite me, and the writing didn't seem all that compelling. On the other hand, I absolutely loved "Halibut" - it is one of my favorite stories of all time. Each of the occurrences it describes is brilliantly timed, and the whole thing fits together in a brilliantly peculiar way. But, I wonder, did everyone else think that this story was excellent? I don't know.
So maybe all of the stories are excellent, and some appeal to people like me, and others appeal to different people. It seems possible. I'd be curious to know what other people think.
Israeli Magical Realism January 1, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
Who knew the Magical Realist mantle would end up in Tel Aviv? (There's no better place for it!) This is a somewhat uneven collection of short stories, thus the missing star. However, it's extremely rare to find a short story collection where that isn't the case.
Maybe he gets half a star back, and rounded up to the nearest star, because most of these tiny fables are incredibly good. Several are snort-wine-out-your-nose funny, some are perfectly sly, and others are sweet or poignant without sentimentality. A few lumber along unfulfilled, but just a few. (And they're really short.)
He's very a fine writer even in translation, with clear eyes and no fear.
Stellar snippets of quirky "Modern Times" July 3, 2007
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Short stories that run from page- to chapter- length offer giggles, snickers, thought-provocation, a skewered lens on young adult humanity's strangenesses, as written from the point of view of a sort of anthropologically objective, but rather warped, insider.
I've asked my local library to purchase ALL of Etgar Keret's published works, and plan to do the same for my personal collection. These stories are often laugh-out-loud and read-aloud weird and wonderful - like wasabi peanuts, they have zing and crunch - and leave me wanting more!
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