The celebrated Pulitzer finalist and prize-winning author of Dinner at the Center of the Earth and What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank delivers his best work yet, a streamlined comic masterpiece about a son’s failure to say Kaddish for his father. Larry is the secular son in a family of Orthodox Brooklyn Jews. When his father dies, it’s his responsibility to recite the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, every day for eleven months. To the horror and dismay of his sister, Larry refuses—imperiling the fate of his father’s soul. To appease her, Larry hatches an ingenious if cynical plan, hiring a stranger through a website called kaddish.com to recite the prayer and shepherd his father’s soul safely to rest. Sharp, irreverent, hilarious, and wholly irresistible, Englander’s tale of a son who makes a diabolical compromise ingeniously captures the tensions between tradition and modernity—a book to be devoured in a single sitting whose pleasures and provocations will be savored long after.
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“This is the rare and extraordinary audiobook that reaches new heights because of the narrator’s flawless performance. Rob Shapiro delivers the material perfectly while enhancing every scene with a style and diversity of tones and emotions that highlight each moment…Listeners will want to replay the audiobook to experience every nuance of Englander’s prose and Shapiro’s exceptional performance. Winner of the AudioFile Earphones Award.”
— AudioFile
“Englander demonstrates his skill at placing timeless concerns of Judaism in sharply modern circumstances.”
— Kirkus ReviewsBe the first to write a review about this audiobook!
Nathan Englander’s short fiction has appeared in the New Yorker, Atlantic, and numerous anthologies, including The Best American Short Stories and The O. Henry Prize Stories. He is the author of the novel The Ministry of Special Cases and the story collection For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, which earned him a PEN/Malamud Award and the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Rob Shapiro is a musician, writer, voice actor, and Earphones Award–winning narrator. He performed several seasons of radio comedy on Minneapolis Public Radio and voiced the titular lion in Leo the Lion. He is a musician and composer with his critically acclaimed band Populuxe. He is also a business consultant and software system designer.