For the Relief of Unbearable Urges

One of the most stunning literary debuts of our time, these energized, irreverent, and deliciously inventive stories introduce an astonishing new talent.

In the collection's hilarious title story, a Hasidic man gets a special dispensation from his rabbi to see a prostitute.

"The Wig" takes an aging wigmaker and makes her, for a single moment, beautiful.

In "The Tumblers," Englander envisions a group of Polish Jews herded toward a train bound for the death camps and, in a deft, imaginative twist, turns them into acrobats tumbling out of harm's way.

"Taut, edgy, sharply observed. . .A revelation of the human condition." - The New York Times Book Review

"Remarkable art. . .The author fills each of these pieces with vivid life, with characters that jump off the page." - Newsday

"A debut collection of nine stories that explore the condition of being Jewish, with an often hallucinatory, epigrammatic eloquence that is, as advertised, reminiscent of the fiction of Issac Singer, Saul Bellow, and especially Bernard Malamud. An exemplary fusion of what T.S. Eliot called 'Tradition and Individual Talent,' and a truly remarkable debut." - Kirkus Review, starred review