The Bus Driver Who Wanted To Be God

Classic warped and wonderful stories from a “genius” (The New York Times) and master storyteller. Brief, intense, painfully funny, and shockingly honest, Etgar Keret’s stories are snapshots that illuminate with intelligence and wit the hidden truths of life. As with the best writers of fiction, hilarity and anguish are the twin pillars of his work. Keret covers a remarkable emotional and narrative terrain—from a father’s first lesson to his boy to a standoff between soldiers caught up in the Middle East conflict to a slice of life where nothing much happens. New to Riverhead’s list, these wildly inventive, uniquely humane stories are for fans of Etgar Keret’s inimitable style and readers of transforming, brilliant fiction.

CBrief, intense, painfully funny, and shockingly honest, Etgar Keret's stories are snapshots that illuminate with intelligence and wit the hidden truths of life. As with the best writers of fiction, hilarity and anguish are the twin pillars of his work. Keret covers a remarkable emotional and narrative terrain-from a father's first lesson to his boy to a standoff between soldiers caught up in the Middle East conflict to a slice of life where nothing much happens.

Israel's hippest bestselling young writer today, Etgar Keret is part court jester, part literary crown prince, part national conscience. The Bus Driver Who Wanted to Be God gathers his daring and provocative short stories for the first time in English. Brief, intense, painfully funny, and shockingly honest, Keret's stories are snapshots that illuminate with intelligence and wit the hidden truths of life. As with the best comic authors, hilarity and anguish are the twin pillars of his work. Keret covers a remarkable emotional and narrative terrain-from a father's first lesson to his boy to a standoff between soldiers caught in the Middle East conflict to a slice of life where nothing much happens. Bus Driver includes stories from Keret's bestselling collections in Israel, Pipelines and Missing Kissinger, as well as Keret's major new novella, "Kneller's Happy Campers," a bitingly satirical yet wistful road trip set in the afterlife for suicides.

Imprint. Brief, intense, painfully funny, and shockingly honest, Keret's stories are snapshots that illuminate with intelligence and wit the hidden truths of life. As with the best comic authors, hilarity and anguish are the twin pillars of this young Israeli author's work.

The extraordianry collection has the kind of writing that could hook a lot of readers, including some who rarely open a book

From a "genius" (New York Times) storyteller: a new, subversive, hilarious, heart-breaking collection. "There is sweetheartedness and wisdom and eloquence and transcendence in his stories because these virtues exist in abundance in Etgar himself... I am very happy that Etgar and his work are in the world, making things better." --George Saunders There's no one like Etgar Keret. His stories take place at the crossroads of the fantastical, searing, and hilarious. His characters grapple with parenthood and family, war and games, marijuana and cake, memory and love. These stories never go to the expected place, but always surprise, entertain, and move... In "Arctic Lizard," a young boy narrates a post-apocalyptic version of the world where a youth army wages an unending war, rewarded by collecting prizes. A father tries to shield his son from the inevitable in "Fly Already." In "One Gram Short," a guy just wants to get a joint to impress a girl and ends up down a rabbit hole of chaos and heartache. And in the masterpiece "Pineapple Crush," two unlikely people connect through an evening smoke down by the beach, only to have one of them imagine a much deeper relationship. The thread that weaves these pieces together is our inability to communicate, to see so little of the world around us and to understand each other even less. Yet somehow, in these pages, through Etgar's deep love for humanity and our hapless existence, a bright light shines through and our universal connection to each other sparks alive.

The Israeli Memory Struggle analyzes changes in Israeli perspectives of its history and identity through the 1990s. This particular decade of Israeli history was characterized by significant cultural clashes and vigorous debates over Jewish-Israeli history, identity, literature, and, not the least, the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians. The book provides thought provoking perspectives on issues related to the so-called post-Zionism debates and the globalization of Israeli society through the 1990s. It critically investigates the new Israeli historians, prominent authors of the 1990s, diasporic philosophy, and Israel's 50th anniversary in 1998 in the shape of the TV documentary, Tekumah. Finally, the book discusses new tendencies in Israeli culture that are suggestive to Jewish-Israeli identity in the age of globalization.

This is a collection of stories of betrayal and fear, desire and satisfaction, love, grief and revenge. Contributors include Ali Smith, Tamar Yellin, Amy Bloom and Karen Maitland.

God used an ordinary man, a gambler, on an ordinary job to witness for him on the dark night streets in the downtown Loop of Chicago. There were drunks, police incidents, riots, and people trying to get to their night jobs. There were snowstorms and nasty teenagers. There were trials and blessings, and all the while, God had a plan. He taught this dedicated family man to talk to hundreds of people, while driving his bus, about how God forgave his sin, gave him peace with himself, and his gift of eternal life. Read what God accomplished and determine to allow him to use you where you are too.

God can deliver Sodom & Gomorrah I hope that this book will help you find the true you. You wasnt born a homosexual. Homosexuality is a unclean spirit that the devil had you to believe. You can court on the word of God to help you get deliver. God word is true and it will do what it said it would do. Just truth, believe and have faith God will work it out for you.

From the beginning of time, God has spoken to people in their dreams. Through them he has reached out to both men of God—Isaiah, Daniel, Jeremiah, Jacob, and his dream interpreter son, Joseph—and ungodly men and women, like Pharaoh or Pontius Pilate’s wife. Even today, God has not stopped speaking to us in our dreams. We simply stopped listening or being aware of Him. More than twenty years ago, after God woke him up one night with an incredible dream, author Manny Fernandez set off on a lifelong journey to explore what could be learned from dreams. He made it his mission to teach others how to remember their dreams and, with God’s help, interpret their meaning. In his guidebook, Fernandez includes his own diary of dreams, associated Scriptures and explanations, ways to remember and understand God’s special messages, an examination of parables, and his ideas for connecting with God through dreams and prayer. Wake Up—God’s Talking to You is an innovative teaching tool that guides spiritual seekers through all the ways God speaks to us through dreams and brings us closer to Him.

This is what you do: put somebody in a 40 ft-long, 33,000 lb steel box for several hours a day. Then, add your choice of a few dozen kids hyped up on candy after a party, a few drunken sorority girls, crying toddlers, fog, darkness, and swarming ants attracted to a forbidden pop-tart. Do this and what you will have either a recipe for disaster, or an average day on a school bus (except for the drunken sorority girls - that was not normal!).Now, to the best of my recollection, I've met only one adult who said, "I always wanted to be a school bus driver." Most, like me, wound up taking the job out of desperation, because our spouses told us to, or because we were attracted to the crazy hours and summers off without pay. I'm convinced only a select few wake up one morning and exclaim, "Hey! I want to drive a bus! It'll be fun!" No, in my opinion, a sovereign God sets in motion a variety of calamitous circumstances to place drivers behind the wheels of school buses in order to teach us about life. The rest become transportation managers and dispatchers.Therefore, after nearly fifteen years behind the wheel, I've compiled a collection of mostly-true anecdotes, a few serious observations, and a wealth of wisdom you'd be hard-pressed to find anywhere else, unless you've driven a school bus. However, don't feel you have to drive a bus, or even have a driver's license, to enjoy this book. Even if you've been banned from the road, the following stories will give you a license to laugh.At the end of each story (names have been changed to protect the innocent - especially me) you will find two things, each meant to make you do an "emergency stop" (that's bus lingo) in your brain. First, there will be something called a "Life Lesson." This is the part where I, the brilliant author, will attempt to sound as wise as Solomon by relating a bus-driving story to everyday life. The "Life Lesson" will attempt to bring everything together in a flash of profundity, a moment in time when you will sit back and say, "Wow!" You may even shed a tear.The second thing you will find is something I have decided to call "Route Suggestions." This is the part where I will leave you with some simple bullet-pointed suggestions designed to make your own bus route of life easier. Without them, you could run into dead end streets, make illegal stops, or find yourself out of fuel in the middle of nowhere with crying children wanting mommy and no way to radio for help. For heaven's sake, don't take these route suggestions lightly!By the time you finish this little book, my prayer is that you will have done at least two of the following:1. Made plenty of notes.2. Laughed and cried at least ten times.3. Bought more copies to give to others - because this one is now too special for you to loan or give away.4. Been encouraged in one way or another.5. Developed a closer relationship with the Giver of Life.Come and ride with me! As we traverse the flat, wide-open tobacco fields of Kentucky, to the foggy-mountain curves and narrow city streets of Tennessee, something is bound to stick to your window.

The footpath of a special child becoming a special man, and the challenges met and surmounted by his mother, form the core of this captivating narrative. As we shift between the perspectives of Ella, the mother, and Andrew, the son, we touch down in different time frames, capturing unfettered glimpses into his simple outlook and guileless character, in contrast to Ella’s complicated and multifaceted emotions. Ella juggles poverty, divorce, health crises, remarriage, and tragedy while raising six young children and struggling to navigate Andrew’s special needs. Through her journey, she discovers that life is as much about opposition and extremity as it is about smooth sailing. The story underscores common challenges of raising special-needs children, such as confusing medical diagnoses, problematic glitches in the educational system, and unsolicited opinions and judgments offered liberally by well-meaning outsiders. Far from clinical, the story is poignant and emotional, with some surprising twists and turns. Throughout, we become acquainted with the sincere and unassuming man that is Andrew as he embarks upon a surprisingly fortuitous career as a tour bus driver, one who genuinely cares about each passenger. The Bus Driver’s Mother portrays the pain, challenges, and disappointments integral to life. It also depicts the wonder, surprises, and blessings which come, when least expected, along the way. It proposes that every level of intellect should be esteemed, and that indeed, every child ought to be cherished.

One day a man gets on a bus and it changes his life forever. He learns a valuable lesson about respecting others.

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2015 GOODREADS CHOICE AWARDS ‘BEST HUMOUR’ A brilliant, hilarious memoir from a master storyteller Over the last seven years, Etgar Keret has had plenty of reasons to worry. His son, Lev, was born during a terrorist attack in Tel Aviv. His father became sick. And he has been constantly tormented by nightmarish visions of former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, anti-Semitic remarks both real and imagined, and, perhaps most worrisome of all, a dogged telemarketer who seems likely to chase him to the grave. Emerging from these darkly absurd circumstances is a series of funny, touching ruminations on everything from his three-year-old son’s impending military service to the terrorist mindset behind Angry Birds. The Seven Good Years is a tender and entertaining tale of a father bringing up his son in a country beset by wars and alarms. Told in Keret’s inimitable style, this wise, witty memoir is full of wonder and love, poignant insights, and irrepressible humour. Moving deftly between the personal and the political, the playful and the profound, it reveals the human need to find good in the least likely places, and the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of our capricious world. PRAISE FOR ETGAR KERET ‘Keret possesses an imagination not easily slotted into conventional literary categories. His … short stories might be described as Kafkaesque parables, magic-realist knock-knock jokes or sad kernels of cracked cosmic wisdom.’ The New York Times ‘[Keret’s writing] testifies to the power of the surreal, the concise and the fantastic … oblique, breezy, seriocomic fantasies that defy encapsulation, categorization and even summary.’ The Washington Post