Nathan Englander Essay

Nathan Englander is one of the United States best-known contemporary fiction writers who has made a name for himself writing about Orthodox Jewish themes. His work has appeared in some of the most venerated publications including The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, and several anthologies such as The Pushcart Prize, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and The Best American Short Stories. For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, which was his debut collection of short stories, was a winner of the Sue Kauffman Prize for First Fiction and the Faulkner/PEN Malamud Award by the American Award of Arts and Letters. What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank that came out in 2012 made the shortlist for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. What makes Englander’s

Born in West Hempstead, New York he lived in an Orthodox Jewish community and would spend up to twelve hours every day with rabbis. For his high school studies, he went to the Hebrew Academy of Nassau for his high school studies before he attended State University of New York. His only training in the arts was when he attended the University of Iowa Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He would immigrate to Israel for further collegiate studies in the mid-nineties where he lived for half a decade. He first got interested in documenting Jewish history when he first heard of the 1952 purge of Jewish writers by Stalin. Determined to capture their story, he would write his first title The Twenty Seventh Man that would be one of the anchor stories of his collection of short stories For the Relief of Unbearable Urges. He would soon follow that with the Pulitzer winning collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank that came out in 2013. After several tweaks and editing, he would collaborate with Nora Ephron to produce The Twenty Seventh Man into a play at the Old Globe Theater in San Diego. Englander has taught the Master of Fine Arts Program in Creative Writing at CUNY Hunter College and New York University’s MFA program. He currently has two homes in Madison, Wisconsin and in Brooklyn, New