- Nathan Englander
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Nathan Englander, October 29, 2007. Photo by Christopher Peterson
Nathan Englander is a Jewish-American author born in Long Island, NY in 1970. He wrote the short story collection, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., in 1999. The volume won widespread critical acclaim, earning Englander the 2000 PEN/Faulkner Malamud Award and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Sue Kauffman Prize, and established him as an important writer of fiction.[1]
Contents
Education and background
Englander grew up as part of the Orthodox Jewish community in West Hempstead, New York.[2] He attended the Hebrew Academy of Nassau County for high school, and is an alumnus of the Binghamton University, and the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa.
Career
Since the publication of For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, he has received a number of awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Bard Fiction Prize, and a fellowship at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.[3] Three of his short stories have appeared in editions of The Best American Short Stories. "The Gilgul of Park Avenue" appeared in the 2000 edition, with guest editor E.L. Doctorow; and "How We Avenged the Blums" appeared in the 2006 edition, guest edited by Ann Patchett. Another story in the collection, "The Twenty-Seventh Man", is set to debut as a play in February, 2012.[4]
The Ministry of Special Cases, the long-awaited follow-up to his debut, was released on April 24, 2007. The novel is set in 1976 in Buenos Aires during Argentina's "Dirty War" and has been described as "an impeccably paced, historically accurate novel which is alternatively side-splitting and frighteningly macabre." [5] Englander has said of his novel that "...I resisted calling it a political book, in that it wasn’t my intent—that is, I had no corrupting (as I’d see it) preconceived position that I was pushing. There’s a lot of politics in my novel, because it’s central to the world of that novel."[6]
Personal
Englander lives in New York. He teaches fiction as a part of CUNY Hunter College's Master of Fine Arts Program in Creative Writing.
Nathan Englander was a Fall 2009 Mary Ellen von der Heyden Fellow for Fiction at the American Academy in Berlin and working on his second novel Coward: A Novel.
References
- ^ Malcolm Jones, Newsweek, March 29, 1999; http://www.nypl.org/research/chss/scholars/pastfellows.html.
- ^ Gussow, Mel. "Captured in Stories, The World He Left; For Author's Debut, Tales of Orthodox Jews", The New York Times, July 5, 1999. "Mr. Englander, who grew up in West Hempstead on Long Island, now lives in Jerusalem, and in that is one of the many paradoxes of his life."
- ^ http://www.nypl.org/research/chss/scholars/pastfellows.html.
- ^ The Public Theater 2011-12 Season
- ^ Nolan, Val. "Darkly comic tale of family in Argentina", The Sunday Business Post, August 26, 2007. Accessed August 16, 2008.
- ^ Galchen, Rivka. "Nathan Englander", BOMB Magazine, September, 2007. Retrieved July 29, 11.
External links
- Nathan Englander's page on Knopf's website
- For the Relief of Unbearable Pressure: A Profile of Nathan Englander
- Radio Interview on Bookworm
- Englander's website
Stories online:
Categories:- 1970 births
- Living people
- Binghamton University alumni
- People from Hempstead (town), New York
- Iowa Writers' Workshop alumni
- Hunter College faculty
- American academics of English literature
- American short story writers
- American novelists
- Jewish American novelists
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