For the Relief of Unbearable Urges: Stories, Paperback

Awards🏆
Nominee (1999) - L.A. Times Book Prize - (First Fiction)
Nominee (1999) - National Jewish Book Award - (Fiction)
Nominee (1999) - Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award - (Fiction)
Winner (2002) - Bard Fiction Prize - (Emerging Writer)

Contributor(s):

• Author: Nathan Englander

Energized, irreverent, and deliciously inventive stories from Pulitzer-nominated, bestselling author of What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank.

In the collection's hilarious title story, a Hasidic man gets a special dispensation from his rabbi to see a prostitute. The Wig takes an aging wigmaker and makes her, for a single moment, beautiful. In The Tumblers, Englander envisions a group of Polish Jews herded toward a train bound for the death camps and, in a deft, imaginative twist, turns them into acrobats tumbling out of harm's way.

For the Relief of Unbearable Urges is a work of startling authority and imagination--a book that is as wondrous and joyful as it is wrenchingly sad. It hearalds the arrival of a remarkable new storyteller.
 
Review citations

• New York Times - pg. 36 - 04/09/2000