Suddenly, a Knock on the Door / Etgar Keret 189 p.

This book leaves me speechless (or whatever the writing equivalent of speechless is: I just don't know what to say about it).  Israel's Keret packs this slim volume with short stories so brief and seemingly innocuous that their power amazes me.  They are dry, funny, not quite real, and sharp but not cruel.  In Lieland, a man stumbles across a hole in the ground which leads to a land where he meets all the lies he's ever told.  In Teamwork a father and toddler son plot revenge against an abusive babysitter.  A man tells us the contents of his pockets - that's it, really, the whole story - and it's moving.  (The title, of course, is What Do We Have in Our Pockets?)  My favorite of the collection is What, of This Goldfish, Would You Wish? in which a man making a documentary of the wishes of ordinary people encounters something unusual.  Keret's writing looks easy at first glance  - you think, 'I could write that.'  If it were easy, though, someone else would have written these a long time ago.