What do you get when you cross Philip Roth with Alfred Hitchcock? That’s the subject of my latest piece for Nextbook.org, a look at a little-known Roth short story called “The Contest for Aaron Gold,” and its adaptation for TV in 1960.

The Girl on the Fridge
By Etgar Keret
Translated by Miriam Shlesinger and Sondra Silverston
173 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

Think of it this way: if you pay the cover price for Etgar Keret’s newly translated collection of stories, The Girl on the Fridge, you’ll be shelling out approximately 25 cents for each of the 46 fictions included. Some of them aren’t much longer than a paragraph, true, and some you’ll forget by the time you turn a page, but what do you expect for a lousy quarter, especially in this rotten economy? If even a handful of the stories haunt you, shake you, throw you for a loop—and they will—you’ll feel like you’ve won the literary lottery. (more…)

The Collected Stories
By Leonard Michaels
Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 403 pages. $26.

Unlike other masters of the short story—say, Bernard Malamud, in whose Complete Stories we witness the author’s approach shifting regularly and unpredictably, or Grace Paley, whose Collected Stories manifests relatively stable interests and methods—Leonard Michaels transformed his style dramatically, if gradually, during his career. Reading him chronologically in the new Collected Stories, beginning with the work he composed in the early ‘60s and continuing through the final publications before his death in 2003, the evolution of Michaels’ oeuvre stares you smack in the face. (more…)

Collected Stories, Volume III
By Isaac Bashevis Singer
Edited by Ilan Stavans
Library of America. 899 pages. $35.

The Anglo-Jewish author and playwright Israel Zangwill, who was once perhaps the most famous Jew in the world, remarked around the turn of the last century that Yiddish literature was “rich in men of talent, and even genius, whose names have rarely reached the outside world.”

Oy, how times have changed. (more…)

Natasha and Other Stories
By David Bezmozgis
Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 147 pages. $18.

In its darkest years, the Soviet Union swallowed up some of the most promising writers of the 20th century. As readers, we’ll never know exactly how much was lost, but it’s natural to wonder. What if Isaac Babel, the Russian-Jewish master of the modern short story, hadn’t been executed by Stalin’s goons? What if he had escaped Russia to a somewhat friendlier environment — like, say, suburban Toronto in the 1980s?

David Bezmozgis’s Natasha and Other Stories reads like the product of that ridiculous hypothetical. (more…)

The Place Will Comfort You: Stories
By Naama Goldstein
Scribner. 224 pages. $22.

In her debut collection of short stories, “The Place Will Comfort You,” Naama Goldstein explores the emotional effects of displacement from American to Israeli culture and back again. As an epigraph and symbol for the constant flux of migration to and from Israel — the shuffle of ideologies and practicalities played out by a few thousand migrants each year — Goldstein chooses the verses from Genesis 28, in which Jacob dreams of a ladder standing on the ground, reaching up to the sky, with “angels of God ascending and descending on it.” (more…)

The View from Stalin’s Head
By Aaron Hamburger
Random House. 245 pages. $12.95.

If recent literary fiction is any indication, Prague is giving Brooklyn a run for its money in terms of attracting young, disaffected American Jewish men. Gary Shteyngart’s “The Russian Debutante’s Handbook” returns a post-Soviet Manhattanite slacker back not to the St. Petersburg of his birth, but to a thinly-veiled Prague, and Jonathan Safran Foer wrote the first draft of “Everything Is Illuminated” in an apartment there. Now another young American Jew, Aaron Hamburger, has published a collection of stories about the expatriate experience in the Czech Republic, in “The View From Stalin’s Head.” (more…)

Fabulous Small Jews: Stories
By Joseph Epstein
352 pages. Houghton Mifflin. $23.

Jews have an age-old answer to snobbery. It’s called chutzpah. If some pretentious jerk looks down his nose at you because of the “-berg” at the end of your name or the Honda at the end of your driveway, Jewish wisdom teaches that you just give him the old stink-eye and tell him where he can shove his judgments. Mordecai Richler knew this, Alan Dershowitz knows it, and apparently Joseph Epstein knows it, too. (more…)

Lost Tribe: Jewish Fiction from the Edge
Edited by Paul Zakrzewski.
Perennial. 550 pages. $14.95.

Paul Zakrzewski’s new collection of contemporary Jewish-American fiction, Lost Tribe, is that rare anthology that adds up to more than the sum of its parts and is, in fact, worth talking about. While the stories vary in literary quality and entertainment value, the book offers a revealing cross-section of the youngest generation of American Jewish authors, and, through them, of the youngest generation of American Jewish adults.

To be clear, this is a valuable book of uneven stories about massively screwed up Jews. (more…)

The Middle of the Night: Stories
By Daniel Stolar
Picador. 244 pages. $23.

When Olympic judges score divers and figure skaters, they award points based on the level of difficulty of the routine. I propose that the same concept be applied to our judging of fiction, with a reverse twist: Whereas in athletics high levels of difficulty are associated with flashy eye-catching spins and leaps, in fiction it is the sedate writers who deserve bonus points.

If you’re willing to accept this judging system, allow me to introduce you to a writer who scores an elegant 10 out of 10. Daniel Stolar’s stories, collected in The Middle of the Night, are not at all flashy, but in their quiet understanding of human relations they achieve admirable emotional effects. (more…)