Nathan Englander, "Dinner at the Center of the Earth"

Englander’s second novel uses the intense relationship between a political prisoner and his guard to illuminate the complexities of Israeli-Palestinian relations. Aside from the guard, who has watched over this prisoner for twelve years, the only person who know the man’s whereabouts is Israel’s controversial leader, the General, hospitalized and perhaps dying. Englander, who lived in Israel for five years, evokes the tensions of a deeply divided country by recounting the stories of individual characters whose fates are ineluctably connected, and he dramatizes the moral ambiguities faced by everyone involved. Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at New York University, Englander is the prize-winning author of The Ministry of Special Cases and the short-story collections For the Relief of Unbearable Urges and What We Talk about When We Talk about Anne Frank.

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Produced by Tom Warren