68 WORLD LITERATURE TODAY reviews the state’s propaganda loudspeakers blaring their version of Jun Do’s story (presumably the state’s altered version of the biography written by the nameless state interrogator) as the selected winner of the Best North Korean Story. In the narrative, Johnson speaks to his largest theme, the supremacy of national interests and propaganda over the individual: “Stories are factual. If a farmer is declared a music virtuoso by the state, everyone had better start calling him maestro. And secretly, he’d be wise to start practicing the piano. For us, the story is more important than the person.” Although the first half of the book serves as a sort of prologue to the more interesting Jun Do / Commander Ga storyline, and nearly this much of the book is required before the story begins layering rich, satisfying implications and picking up any steam, it all ends at a dead sprint as Jun Do sacrifices the only identity he ever had for the sake of the only woman he ever loved. At times, the sadistic governmental whims, Kim Jong Il’s character (even though Johnson said he toned him down to make him more believable), and the content of propaganda messages border on the farcical, but the story ’s ability to elicit empathy makes the individual’s struggle for identity against an oppressive North Korea powerfully human and authentic. As an aside, we certainly can’t ignore that Kim Jong Il is alive and well in The Orphan Master’s Son. Johnson expressed concern that Kim’s December 2011 death would demystify the legend (much the way Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi’s deaths did for them) before Orphan’s January 2012 release. But, he said, the secrecy surrounding Kim’s death only served to magnify the reality Kim had so meticulously manufactured. John Tyler Allen New York Etgar Keret. Suddenly, a Knock on the Door. Miriam Shlesinger, Sondra Silverston, and Nathan Englander, tr. New York. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 2012. isbn 9780374533335 Some stories are hard to get out of your head, and Etgar Keret writes such stories. His latest collection brims with tales filled with sorrowful poignancy and sympathetic isolation. His telltale flare for the magical and the absurd is present here in such works as “Lieland,” in which a habitual liar enters a world populated by the characters from his and others’ lies, and “Unzipping,” in which a curious woman discovers a zipper under her lover’s tongue and finds a completely different man underneath when she pulls it (see WLT, Nov. 2008, 19). But many of his characters in this work are average Joes who simply play out a few moments of their mundane lives for us yet succeed at revealing more about our own lives than if they had gone on a great adventure. One such tale is “Healthy Start,” in which Miron, a lonely man who eats his breakfast at the same café each morning , starts inviting strangers to his table and pretending to be whomever they presume him to be. As expected, this new habit ends in disaster when Miron meets with an angry man and pretends to be the lover of the man’s wife. Yet, as Miron is lying on the ground covered in blood after the man beats him up, he feels alive, perhaps for the first time. Keret shows us that we need the painful, horrible moments of life to provide the fertile ground for awakening. Keret is more than your average storyteller—he is an acerbic social critic, with an imagination like fire. His insight burns all, but this destruction is precisely what paves the way for new growth. His identity as an Israeli writer is everywhere apparent, and he often uses his penetrating eyes to critique the politics of his region. “Pick a Color” is, for me, the fullest embodiment of Keret’s poignancy , imagination, and cultural criticism . In this story, violence befalls SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER 2012 69 Homecoming Denys Johnson-Davies, ed. and tr. American University in Cairo Press Since the inception of Egyptian short fiction just sixty years ago, Egyptian writers and translators have struggled to find a place for Egyptian literature on...