“Alien spaceships, parallel worlds… the Israeli writer’s seventh collection is vast in reach, yet grounded in the bewildering absurdity of modern life.” Guardian

“IT’S ABOUT TIME WE ACKNOWLEDGE IT: people are not very good at remembering things the way they really happened. If an experience is an article of clothing, then memory is the garment after it’s been washed, not according to the instructions, over and over again: the colors fade, the size shrinks, the original, nostalgic scent has long since become the artificial orchid smell of fabric softener.

Giora Shviro, may he rest in peace, was thinking all this while standing in line to get into the next world…”

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This story was published on Bookanista in July 2025 on a one-month exclusive to mark UK publication of the collection AUTOCORRECT (Granta Books, £14.99)

Subscribe to Etgar’s Substack to read on: Alphabet Soup

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Author photo by Lielle Sand

Etgar Keret is a leading voice in Israeli literature and cinema. Born in 1967, he is the author of the memoir The Seven Good Years, and six bestselling story collections, which have been published in 50 languages. His writing has been published in the New York Times, Le Monde, the Guardian, the New Yorker, the Paris Review and Esquire. He has also written a number of screenplays, and Jellyfish, his first film as a director alongside his wife Shira Geffen, won the Caméra d’Or prize for best first feature at Cannes in 2007. In 2010 he was awarded the Chevalier medallion of France’s Order of Arts and Letters, and in 2016 he won the Bronfman Prize. When he’s not writing, he teaches at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and at Tel Aviv University, or is on the streets demonstrating against his current government. Autocorrect, translated by Jessica Cohen and Sondra Silverston, is published in hardback by Granta Books.
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Read our interview with Etgar around his previous collection, Fly Already