Once again, a never before published story is available in audio thanks to Ira Glass.
In Episode 393 of his show "This American Life", around 52:00, Actor Matt Malloy reads Keret's new story "The Man Who Knew What I Was About To Say"

In a New York Public Library's Live from the NYPL event, "This American Life" host Ira Glass talks with writer Etgar Keret about his short fiction and films, runaway piggy banks, bus drivers and other, lesser gods.

Around 31:00, Keret reads a never-published-before story about telling a story at gun point.

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When Keret presented Jellyfish at Yale University, six Jews in the audience walked out halfway through the screening, screaming that he was an anti-Zionist, self-hating Israeli. Their gripe was a scene in the film that showed a couple that kept having to change from one sleazy Tel Aviv hotel to another. "They thought I was presenting Israel as a shitty country with shitty hotels so no tourists would come here and yelled out that it was no wonder I got French financing for the film because the French hate Jews."

The reverse was true in Italy, where the film was strongly criticised for being anti-Palestinian because it portrayed a Palestinian director who did a bad job of directing a Shakespeare play.

"That makes sense," I told Uzi. "But what do I do to make sure that that nightmare doesn't come back, see a psychologist?"
"That won't do you any good," he interrupted. "... What you need isn't a bunch of lies from a Ph.D. in clinical psych.
You need a real solution: a nest-egg in a foreign bank account. ..."

Etgar Keret, with "Jellyfish" and "Wristcutters: A Love Story", is fast becoming a favored supplier of quirky plots for indie filmmakers. With the imaginative, intertwining stories in "$9.99", it's easy to see why.

"$9.99" marries the tradition of Jewish self-flagellating humor with uncanny absurdity. The film shows us miracles coexisting with the mundane, a tone of disorienting everyday oddness that is equal parts "Seinfeld," Kafka and Gumby.

Using the medium of Wallace and Gromit and Gumby, Israeli filmmaker Tatia Rosenthal turns her clay figures into real people in $9.99, a wise, wistful study of hope and dread

A special evening at Symphony Space celebrated the startling fiction of two young authors, the American Aimee Bender, and the Israeli Etgar Keret.

• Drunken Mimi by Aimee Bender, read by Bernadette Quigley
• Your Man by Etgar Keret, read by David Rakoff
• Shooting Tuvia by Etgar Keret, read by David Rakoff
• Death Watch by Aimee Bender read by Bernadette Quigley

[Download MP3] [Listen online]

"$9.99" has a broad appeal, but fans of quality low-tech animation are going to be blown away.

COLLECTION
A Better Angel, Chris Adrian (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux)
Dangerous Laughter, Steven Millhauser (Knopf)
The Diving Pool, Yoko Ogawa (Picador)
The Girl on the Fridge, Etgar Keret (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux)
Just After Sunset, Stephen King (Scribner)Wild Nights!, Joyce Carol Oates (Ecco)

"There was some talk at the end of last year about "$9.99" emerging as a dark-horse candidate in the animated-feature category at the Academy Awards. Though that never materialized, such rumors are a testament to the caliber of the film and the subjects it broaches."

"The result of [Keret's] screenwriting collaboration with Rosenthal is a movie that entertains and enlightens without being preachy - in fact, most of its beliefs are strenuously ambiguous; that's a key part of the joke."

... Why are people always looking for easy answers to unanswerable questions?
I think the film isn't about people looking for easy answers as much as it is the fact that people gave up on looking. Because I think that sometimes the yearning and the search is some sort of a meaning. And the difference between the character who wants to order the meaning of life and the other people around him is that you can say he's naive and unrealistic, but he didn't give up. He's obsessed with this question. The other people are already executing their plan Bs and Cs - they've already given up on whatever they once believed in ...

The investment is worth it for a movie ticket to an original universe of characters in search of contentment

Etgar Keret is sometimes described as Israel's Woody Allen, but this hugely popular humorist is more fanciful and morbid in his evocation of cultural schlemielery. Co-written with Keret, Tatia Rosenthal's stop-motion animation $9.99 adds a measure of creepiness to Keret's dark whimsy.

Rosenthal gives the entire production a lovely, fine-art look, and a real feeling that we're looking at life as it's lived - even if there are angels involved, and everyone is made of modeling clay. How often do you see that even in live-action films?

The Israeli writer Etgar Keret possesses an imagination not easily slotted into conventional literary categories. His very short stories might be described as Kafkaesque parables, magic-realist knock-knock jokes or sad kernels of cracked cosmic wisdom. When such vignettes are strung together into a feature — as in “Jellyfish” (2007), which he directed with his wife, Shira Geffen, and now in Tatia Rosenthal’s “$9.99” — they become even more elusive and strange.

You know there is a never-ending debate over the question of whether Netanyahu has really changed. What is your opinion?
Barak gave vent to a morose sigh, like those he attached in his speech to the word "opportunity," and then continued with a warm smile, almost heartwarming.
"Tell me," he said, "have you changed?"

"[Kneller's Happy Campers] is like nothing else"

Actor Matt Malloy reads "Shoes" by Etgar Keret, about a boy who betrays his people with a pair of shoes on the radio show "This American Life".