What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank is a 2012 short story collection by the American writer Nathan Englander. The book was first published on February 7, 2012 through Knopf and collects eight of Englander's short stories, including the title story "What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank." The title of the collection takes its influence from Raymond Carver's 1981 short story collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. The book was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, losing to Adam Johnson's The Orphan Master's Son. Englander's collection was awarded the 2012 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award.
Short stories, in which the characters are stripped down to their bones. We learn things about them that we didn't expect. And would maybe have preferred not to know.
Excellent stories.
This is my first Englander and I am impressed. He demonstrates great range in these eight stories, from the blazing to the subtle, the good and the bad. Where he's best is hitting the solid middle gray stuff - where you don't know who to root for, whether the actor is in the right or the wrong, whether you like the person for what he's trying to do or if he's necessarily good or if he's just interesting.
WWTAWWTAAF is one of the books to hold up as a reason we ought to read at all. Englander presents multiple perspectives that are foreign to my own, but does so in such a humanizing way as to broaden my own. The characters occupy a space and are formed by experiences that necessarily lead to a response I could not have expected from myself. I put the book down feeling like I …
This is my first Englander and I am impressed. He demonstrates great range in these eight stories, from the blazing to the subtle, the good and the bad. Where he's best is hitting the solid middle gray stuff - where you don't know who to root for, whether the actor is in the right or the wrong, whether you like the person for what he's trying to do or if he's necessarily good or if he's just interesting.
WWTAWWTAAF is one of the books to hold up as a reason we ought to read at all. Englander presents multiple perspectives that are foreign to my own, but does so in such a humanizing way as to broaden my own. The characters occupy a space and are formed by experiences that necessarily lead to a response I could not have expected from myself. I put the book down feeling like I understood the world and its characters just a little bit better.
[I hope we get to type WWTAWWTAAF a lot over the coming year.]
