Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    The Bus Driver Who Wanted To Be God & Other Stories
    Unavailable
    The Bus Driver Who Wanted To Be God & Other Stories
    Unavailable
    The Bus Driver Who Wanted To Be God & Other Stories
    Audiobook4 hours

    The Bus Driver Who Wanted To Be God & Other Stories

    Written by Etgar Keret

    Narrated by Kirby Heyborne

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateOct 13, 2015
    ISBN9780147522382
    Unavailable
    The Bus Driver Who Wanted To Be God & Other Stories
    Author

    Etgar Keret

    Etgar Keret (Tel Aviv, 1967) ha publicado libros de relatos, una novela y cómics, todos ellos best-sellers en Israel. Su obra ha sido traducida a treinta idiomas y ha merecido diversos premios literarios. Numerosos cortometrajes se han basado en sus relatos, e incluso uno de ellos ganó el American MTV Prize en 1998. Actualmente es profesor adjunto en el departamento de Cine y Televisión de la Universidad de Tel Aviv. Su película Jellyfish, realizada en colaboración con Shira Geffen, mereció los premios Cámara de oro, Mejor Película y Mejor Guión en la Semana de la Crítica, en el festival de Cannes de 2007. Ha sido condecorado Caballero de la Orden de las Artes y las Letras 2010 por el Ministerio de Cultura de Francia.

    Related to The Bus Driver Who Wanted To Be God & Other Stories

    Related audiobooks

    Literary Fiction For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      February's 10 Books To Break The Winter Doldrums

      Feb 13, 2019

      Here are the 10 books that impressed the Monitor's book critics this month: 1   Here and Now and Then by Mike Chen Kin Stewart is a time-traveling secret agent with a heart of gold who got lost on a mission and created a family. Intelligent, caring

      3 min read

    • Article

      Representations of Burns

      Jun 11, 2022

      Performing Robert Burns: Enactments and Representations of the ʻNational Bard’ Edited by Ian Brown and Gerard Carruthers Edinburgh University Press, 2021 224 pages Hardback, £75.00 ISBN: 9781474457149 This book sets out to demonstrate how the work of

      2 min read

    • Article

      Representations of Burns

      Jun 11, 2022

      Performing Robert Burns: Enactments and Representations of the ʻNational Bard’ Edited by Ian Brown and Gerard Carruthers Edinburgh University Press, 2021 224 pages Hardback, £75.00 ISBN: 9781474457149 This book sets out to demonstrate how the work of

      2 min read

    • Article

      Capturing The Esoteric Artistry Of The Crop Circle

      May 23, 2022

      There is a reason why most novelists stick to the bits of life their readers will be familiar with. Break-up tales, crime thrillers and historical journeys are genres in their own right because we instantly know the remit, we know how it feels, what

      2 min read

    • Article

      Q&A

      Aug 4, 2022

      Dan Jones is an award-winning historian, broadcaster and journalist, and the author of several bestselling books on the medieval period, including Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages (Head of Zeus, 2021). Essex Dogs, the first part o

      2 min read

    • Article

      The Good, The Bad And The Ugly

      Dec 31, 2022

      Jens Erik, an expoliceman, is an unlikely hero. To his daughter, he is embarrassingly racist. To his former colleagues he is a Luddite. His mind keeps returning to the body of a Black man recovered from the sea some years previously. Harris Malouf is

      1 min read

    • Article

      Time Out

      Jun 5, 2020

      Time Out
      5 min read

    • Article

      Time Out

      Jun 5, 2020

      Time Out
      5 min read

    • Article

      The Best Books Of The Year

      Dec 13, 2023

      The Best Books Of The Year
      8 min read

    • Article

      Reviews

      Oct 26, 2023

      Reviews
      8 min read

    • Article

      Reviews

      Aug 12, 2021

      Reviews
      6 min read

    • Article

      When Earp Met Hearst

      Nov 8, 2022

      When Earp Met Hearst
      2 min read

    • Article

      Books On Wizards And Witchcraft

      May 16, 2022

      One of the first books I read cover to cover at university. The winner of the first Wolfson Prize, it salvaged thousands of details about English popular belief and arranged them into a vivid worldview we had lost. It changed my life. A masterly acco

      1 min read

    • Article

      Reviews

      May 2, 2023

      Reviews
      2 min read

    • Article

      Summer Book Reviews

      Dec 27, 2018

      by Ken Saunders Published by Allen & Unwin ISBN 9781760631062 $29.99 A witty and thought-provoking work of fiction by a new writer, projecting Australia ten years into the future. Parking meters have become gaming machines, robotic drones swarm, and

      4 min read

    • Article

      Tuesday New Release Day: Starring Scott, Bucak, Zeh, Steinberg, and More

      Aug 20, 2019

      An intriguing near-future dystopian thriller, two innovative short story collections, and a remarkable portrait of Britain at its Brexit inflection point. The post Tuesday New Release Day: Starring Scott, Bucak, Zeh, Steinberg, and More appeared firs

      5 min read

    • Article

      Episodes

      Jul 17, 2019

      Episodes
      1 min read

    • Article

      Reviews

      Mar 7, 2023

      Reviews
      2 min read

    • Article

      10 Best Books of September: The Monitor's Picks

      Sep 21, 2017

      From Tsarist Russia to Trump's America, and from evocative short stories to the best of expository prose, here are the 10 September releases most highly recommended by the Monitor's book critics.

      2 min read

    • Article

      PUT YOUR NOSE IN A BOOK FACT & FICTION

      Oct 13, 2023

      BY DARREL BRISTOW-BOVEY Jonathan Ball, RRP R280 For Heroic Age Explorers, ‘Antarctica was a katabasis: a journey beyond the limits of experience, a voyage beyond life to the underworld’. And for Ernest Henry Shackleton and his crew aboard Endurance,

      3 min read

    • Article

      February Preview: The Millions Most Anticipated (This Month)

      Jan 30, 2023

      We wouldn’t dream of abandoning our vast biannual Most Anticipated Book Previews, but we thought a monthly reminder would be helpful (and give us a chance to note titles we missed the first time around). Here’s what we’re looking out for in February:

      5 min read

    • Article

      Books

      Mar 18, 2021

      Books
      3 min read

    • Article

      Comics And Graphic Novels

      Jan 4, 2021

      Martin Stiff Comic Toolbox, 2020 Hb, pp224, £23.99, ISBN 9781838131203 In terms of fantastic fiction the German Democratic Republic is an underused setting. We’re more used to encountering East Germany in spy stories than horror stories, yet the sens

      4 min read

    • Article

      The Poet’s Pike

      May 5, 2022

      The Poet’s Pike
      1 min read

    • Article

      Book Reviews

      Jul 7, 2021

      By Martin W. Bowman ISBN: 978-1526705488 (Pen & Sword Books, 2019) – £25. The title of this book should be taken as instructive. That the last twenty per cent of this book is dedicated to sprawling appendices should be taken as indicative. The fact t

      6 min read

    Reviews for The Bus Driver Who Wanted To Be God & Other Stories

    4/5

    161 ratings13 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      I absolutely loved this collection! There were a lot of gems in this book. A few of the stories were difficult for me to understand exactly WHY they were written, but not many, and I feel that I will understand them in due time. If you liked The Nimrod Flipout and The Girl on the Fridge, this collection will not be a disappointment!
    • 5/5
      Keret lets you look at the world differently in a very clever way
    • 5/5
      I read the first 3-4 stories when I first picked this book up, and then finished the rest this past week. I was really impressed by this collection. His stories are funny, complex, sometimes profound, and very relevant (how many review bingo words did I get there?). I expected quirky but I really don't think they are.

      The last piece reminded me of a Kelly Link story (there are lots of other similarities there) and would like to read both of them again back to back.
    • 2/5
      These brief absurd stories left me pretty cold - there are flashes of humour and pathos, but it all felt too arch and self-consciously wacky to me.
    • 4/5
      There is a direct path between Keret's fevered imagination and his written page. There are no speed limits or detours. The stories won't be inhibited by oppressive laws of physics, or even by reality. These are short intense bursts of 'what ifs'.
      In "One Last Story and That's It", a demon shows up to the house of a writer, to take away his talent. The writer begs him to let him do just one more story. Well, ok, the demon agrees, and so he just hangs out for a bit, watching tv and drinking lemonade. Finally the time comes, and the demon pulls out the talent, folds it neatly and packs it away into a box lined with styrofoam peanuts. The writer half-jokes, hey if you get overstocked on that talent, I'll be glad to take it back. And the demon starts to think, this job is such a crock of shit. Just two more stops til the end of the day.
      "A Souvenir of Hell" is about a tourist village, located at the mouth of the entrance to Hell. It capitalises on the tourist traffic going to Hell. "Hole in the Wall" is a place to yell wishes in to, so a man wishes for and gets an angel, who is some stooped skinny guy that wears a trench coat to hide his wings.
      Surreal, bizarre, funny.
    • 4/5
      If you aren’t already familiar with Keret’s writing, it make take a few of these very short stories to sync up with his particular comic wavelength. Written originally in Hebrew and set, often, in Israel, there are commonplace life events such as universal military service that set the subject matter apart from much North American writing. The stories here are slight, almost oblique, more scene or sketch than story, really. Many carry an overt moral, which may or may not be subverted by the narrator. But the best of them are both ironic and non-ironic at the same time. And that is a delicate balance to strike.There is one longer story here called, “Kneller’s Happy Campers”. It reveals, I think, what happens when you take this style and expand it. It almost begs to become surrealist or absurdist, depending on your point of view. In “Kneller’s Happy Campers”, all of the participants are actually suicides and this is what amounts to their afterlife. It’s a great premise, but you are probably already wondering, “Where do you go with that?” If you are Etgar Keret, you mostly just stay put, wander around a bit, and then head back to where you started. Which makes the afterlife pretty much like life.Gently recommended.
    • 4/5
      The first collection of short stories by Israeli writer Etgar Keret published in English starts out brilliantly, with several surreal and fantastic tales that seem to be a witches' brew of the best of Jorge Luis Borges, mixed with a splash of Julio Cortázar and José Donoso. In the title story, a principled but misunderstood bus driver invokes a higher calling to serve one of his passengers, though with an unexpected result. In "Uterus", a young man despairs when his mother's organ, preserved for prosperity in a local museum, is sold and then hijacked by eco-terrorists. And, in "A Souvenir of Hell", a young Uzbek woman works at a convenience store which primarily serves the residents of Hell, who emerge from its mouth for one day of freedom every 100 years. However, the stories in the latter half of the book, particularly the lengthy Kneller's Happy Campers, were very disappointing to this reader. Despite this, I was sufficiently impressed and enthralled with many of Keret's stories in this collection, and despite my mediocre rating of The Bus Driver Who Wanted to Be God I will eagerly search for more of his books soon.
    • 5/5
      This is a book of short stories by "undoubtedly the most popular writer among Israeli youth", although I feel like that's misleading because these don't feel like stories written expressly for young people (although maybe "youth" just means people under the age of 35? yet what is youth but a state of mind? etc.). Most of Keret's short stories are very short, like maybe they average two-and-a-half pages, but they are also very good; he's not shocking or violent or trying too hard to be funny, and he doesn't really traffic in twist endings, but his stories still feel surprising and fresh. It's hard to summarize the plot of two-page stories without giving things away, so here are first sentences from some of them:This is the story about a bus driver who would never open the door of the bus for people who were late.There's this village in Uzbekistan that was built right smack at the mouth of Hell.The son of the Head of the Mossad didn't even know he was the son of the Head of the Mossad.Dad wouldn't buy me a Bart Simpson doll.I will definitely be reading more of Keret's books.
    • 3/5
      A convenience store at the mouth of hell? A uterus on display at a museum? An afterlife for suicides that is just a little suckier than this one?Etgar Keret is awesome. These stories grab you by the throat and don't let up. Although they seldom exceed five tiny pages, they are memorable and powerful. His style is unlike anything I've read before.I originally heard about Keret when I saw a trailer for "Wristcutters: A Love Story." This fine film starred a man based on Eugene Hutz (Jonfren's endearing tour guide in the film adaptation of "Everything is Illuminated" and lead singer of Gogol Bordello) and had a soundtrack heavily dominated by Gogol Bordello. The movie was pretty good, so I decided to read the novella is was based on. Kneller's Happy Campers is the story about the afterlife for the suicides. Kneller, played beautifully in the movie by Tom Waits, runs a camp of sorts where insignificant miracles are a common occurrence. Totally original and unbelievably fun.I'm going to read the rest of Keret's work as soon as I can get my hands on it. I feel sorry for the guy though. On the back of the book jacket, Keret is described as being "Isreal's Hippest Young Writer." That seems embarassing to me and I hope he never learns to read English so he never knows how his publisher has classified him overseas.
    • 5/5
      According to his bio, Keret is one of the most popular writers among Israeli youth. There's a reason for that - even though his stories are dark, they're hilarious. His ideas are out there and bizarre, but they still seem to make sense somehow... definitely worth reading.
    • 4/5
      I absolutely loved this collection! There were a lot of gems in this book. A few of the stories were difficult for me to understand exactly WHY they were written, but not many, and I feel that I will understand them in due time. If you liked The Nimrod Flipout and The Girl on the Fridge, this collection will not be a disappointment!
    • 5/5
      Flash fiction has always been a bit of a mystery to me, that is, until I picked up this book. Keret is a genius at writing a vignette that looks small (a mere 3-4 pages), but which contains an entire universe. I just fell in love with Keret's writing and his insight into the human heart. The stories are so varied that most everyone will find something to love - from endearing stories like "Breaking the Pig," where a little boy releases his piggybank into the wild rather than be forced to break it with a hammer to heart-wrenching stories like "Cocked and Loaded," which describes with painful poignancy the impotent rage many Israeli soldiers feel towards the Palestinian population. Trivia: For those who have seen the movie Wristcutters, the original story ("Kneller's Happy Campers") can be found in this collection.
    • 5/5
      Very enjoyable. Most of the stories are short-shorts, just a couple of pages long - snack length. He reminds me so much of Murukami. His characters inhabit a universe where all the rules of nature can be broken - the inhabitants of hell are allowed out now and again for souvenir shopping in Uzbekistan, a man screams a wish into a hole in the wall and gains an angel for a friend, another makes a giant pipe into which he vanishes. (You can hear Etgar reading Pipes, here and there are plenty of other links to his work and downloadable stories on this site.)