Margins
kaddish.com book cover
kaddish.com
2019
First Published
3.31
Average Rating
208
Number of Pages

The Pulitzer finalist delivers his best work yet—a brilliant, streamlined comic novel, reminiscent of early Philip Roth and of his own most masterful stories, about a son's failure to say Kaddish for his father Larry is an atheist in a family of orthodox Memphis Jews. When his father dies, it is his responsibility as the surviving son to recite the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, every day for eleven months. To the horror and dismay of his mother and sisters, Larry refuses—thus imperiling the fate of his father's soul. To appease them, and in penance for failing to mourn his father correctly, he hatches an ingenious if cynical plan, hiring a stranger through a website called kaddish.com to recite the daily prayer and shepherd his father's soul safely to rest. This is Nathan Englander's freshest and funniest work to date—a satire that touches, lightly and with unforgettable humor, on the conflict between religious and secular worlds, and the hypocrisies that run through both. A novel about atonement; about spiritual redemption; and about the soul-sickening temptations of the internet, which, like God, is everywhere.

Avg Rating
3.31
Number of Ratings
2,753
5 STARS
11%
4 STARS
32%
3 STARS
40%
2 STARS
15%
1 STARS
3%
goodreads

Author

Nathan Englander
Nathan Englander
Author · 9 books

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. Learn more on Facebook.

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