These eight stories from the PEN/Malamud Award-winning author of For the Relief of Unbearable Urges reveal a gifted young author grappling with great questions of modern life. The title story is a provocative portrait of two marriages in which the Holocaust is played out as a devastating parlor game, while in the outlandishly dark "Camp Sundown," vigilante justice is undertaken by a group of geriatric campers in a bucolic summer enclave, and "Free Fruit for Young Widows" is a small, sharp study in evil, lovingly told by a father to a son.

"[Nathan] Englander's new collection of stories tells the tangled truth of life in prose that, as ever, surprises the reader with its gnarled beauty.... Certifiable masterpieces of contemporary short-story art."—Michael Chabon