“I spend all day being other people,” Nathan Englander told NPR in 2017, shortly after publication of Dinner at the Center of the Earth, a novel set amid the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Brooklyn-based writer was a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for his short story collection, What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank with its celebrated title story in which two Jewish couples tentatively bond over pot, dance in the rain, and debate the lengths they’d go to protect their spouses in a second Holocaust. The collection went on to win the 2012 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, confirming the promise of his 1999 debut, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges which scored a PEN/Malamud Award and the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction. His novel, Kaddish.com, was published in 2019, In 2024, What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank was adapted for the stage in collaboration with the playwright Patrick Marber.

Below are Nathan Englander’s favorite books, available to purchase individually or as a set.