The Seven Good Years: A Memoir

"Israeli writer Etgar Keret usually writes short fiction that’s kind of weird — well-regarded, but weird. Here he turns his focus to the seven real-life years between the birth of his son and the death of his father, who survived the Holocaust. It’s a slim book filled with short essays, some of which draw their power from an evocative portrait of life in modern Israel. (The essay “Pastrami” is named after a game Keret plays with his son when the air raid sirens go off.) But most of them don’t need extra relevance; Keret is such a master at finding the humanity and meaning in the tiniest moments of life."