A review by shanviolinlove
Fly Already: Stories by Etgar Keret

4.0

Shrewd, eccentric, and profoundly delightful collection of short (and I mean SHORT) stories! I discovered Etgar Keret after watching (and re-watching) his 2007 film Jellyfish, and most all of these stories (some are definitely less memorable than others) pack a similar punch. And did I mention eccentric? A billionaire buying up people's birthdays, a set of triplets convinced that a rabbit is actually their estranged father, a series of email exchanges between the hostile son of a Holocaust survivor and an escape room manager, a man known by "A." doomed to age and die rapidly but not before he falls in love with a woman known by "N.", a dystopia in which adolescents are drafted in a never-ending war with the promise of acquiring Pokemon-esque creatures, to name a few. While a few plot lines definitely followed a set formula or aesthetic (I didn't even need to check which titles were featured in The New Yorker, for instance) and more than one story uses the writer-writing-about-writing trope (it can be done, but not this often in the same collection), I had fun reading so many fresh, off-kilter stories. Definitely looking up more from this author!