Kaddish.com

The celebrated Pulitzer finalist and prize-winning author of Dinner at the Center of the Earth and What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank delivers his best work yet, a streamlined comic masterpiece about a son´s failure to say Kaddish for his father. Larry is the secular son in a family of Orthodox Brooklyn Jews. When his father dies, it´s his responsibility to recite the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, every day for eleven months. To the horror and dismay of his sister, Larry refuses--imperiling the fate of his father´s soul. To appease her, Larry hatches an ingenious if cynical plan, hiring a stranger through a website called kaddish.com to recite the prayer and shepherd his father´s soul safely to rest. Sharp, irreverent, hilarious, and wholly irresistible, Englander´s tale of a son who makes a diabolical compromise ingeniously captures the tensions between tradition and modernity--a book to be devoured in a single sitting whose pleasures and provocations will be savored long after.