Rating: 
Summary: For My Friends
Review: Last year I bought the hardcover and thought it was the best collection I had ever read. Now that the paperback is here, I'm buying it for all my friends.
Rating:
Summary: Superb
Review: I heard the author talk at the New York Public Library - fascinating guy, fascinating book. Loved every story in this collection, the plight of two of the female characters, Ruchama and Gita, were particularly wrenching. Englander is an extraordinary writer.
Rating:
Summary: Short Stories
Review: I never read short stories, but picked up this book because of the intriguing title. This collection is brilliant, a must read.
Rating:
Summary: Sensational!
Review: How this collection has fallen to three and a half stars is beyond me. I need not parrot the unparalleled critical acclaim that For the Relief has received from all corners of the literary world. I simply add to them my humble appreciation of this masterful collection. Each story transports you into a world, real or imagined, that would otherwise allude the majority of us. The Twenty Seventh Man opens for us the gates to Stalin's Gulags. Through the eyes of an author who could, by virtue of his age, never have seen such things for himself, the reader is privy to a world of great suffering and greater irony. The Tumblers fashions from the classic Yiddish characters, the people of chelm, a story that transports these simple, comical people into the complex and dreadful world of the Holocaust. The transition is seemless. Mr. Englander drops you on a train with a band of bungling but pious religious Jews, turns them into acrobats and delivers them into mouth of their enemies. The absurdity of their plight mimics the absurdity of the period and is for the reader a window onto the Holocaust. The Wig is another story where the author unveils a world that he must have imagined and yet describes with the clarity of a native. Mr. Englander is an extraordinary writer. This is a collection that will be read a hundred years from now.
Rating: 
Summary: from a non-jewish perspective
Review: I found the book insightful.. I am not Jewish, but I have Jewish friends and it was intreaging to read more about the history and comedy of a Jewish lifesyle. I was particulary shocked by the ending of the title storey. From the begining I was smiling at and enjoying the dialoge between the rabbe and the main character, but by the end of the i was almost crying for him. I heard an interview in NPR with the author and i was expecting a comedy. I purchased the book and much to my dismay and enjoyment I was delighted with the stories.
Rating:
Summary: The Best of The Year
Review: Dear Nathan Englander,Your book has been recognized as one of the best of the year-the decade-the last 50 years-the next 100 years-by The New Yorker, Publishers Weekly, The New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, The San Francisco Chronicle, Talk Magazine, The Washington Post, etc., etc., etc. You deserve all the accolades and more. What a book! Congratulations.
Rating: 
Summary: Derivative; not a new voice
Review: I don't think the problem is so much that the author portrays things in terms of Jewish cliches or jokes; even Jews talk about their own lives in terms of these tropes. More problematic is that someone is our age is writing like Bernard Malamud or Isaac Bashevis Singer.
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Summary: The Dudestud Can Write!
Review: Sure, Englander has a flavor-of-the-month quality about him. He's been relentlessly promoted in the press, and judging from the photo on the book jacket, he is one gorgeous dudestud. But this is one dudestud who can write! His stories are finely wrought miniatures that illuminate the lives of the characters. That he happens to write about the Orthodoxy is besides the point. The criticisms I have read about him engaging in character assassination of the hasidism are ridiculous - he is merely a writer telling a story. His goal is to get at the emotional truth which underlies a situation - not to insult anybody's religion.
Rating:
Summary: delightfully irreverent
Review: englander has delivered a fresh perspective on ancient political and personal problems. other reviewers who criticize this young genius for not writing about his own experience or lambasting orthodox jews miss the point of fiction and writing entirely. surely englander's characters, though struggling with religious constraints and overbearing spouses, have joy as well and the writer has not failed to illustrate their full experience. one only has to look to their manner and listen to their expression a little more carefully. characterization is perhaps the most difficult hurdle for fiction writer's and englander, at 27, is a master. I am especially amazed at his ability to capture the voice of middle aged women, something he surely has never been and never will. should he never write about women? don't be absurd! and thank heavens he has avoided the surely drab memoir of a 27 year old man. the world could do with less biographies and more imagination like that of englander.
Rating: 
Summary: I want more from inside Englander, not more Jewish jokes
Review: Nathan Englander is like a ripening fruit picked and brought to market too early. I love the voice in the last story in this collection, "In This Way We Are Wise," which brings me right into Jerusalem during a bus bombing. It gives me intimate understanding of something I had only seen on the news and read about in the abstract. The language is original and brilliant, and the story is touching and real. The other stories, unfortunately, are derivative and gimmicky. Englander has not experienced being a department-store Santa Claus, a Park Avenue gentile, a Yiddish writer in the former Soviet Union - and it shows. He writes mostly about what he almost knows, what he has heard about, what he has read about in books by I.B. Singer and others. The first eight stories are like standup Jewish jokes. I want more of Nathan Englander himself, his "nefesh" (body and heart and soul). What is it like to move from Long Island, NY, to Israel to become a secular Jew? That, in itself, is a fitting subject for a series of stories, if not a novel. Dear Nathan: Get the wisecracks out of your system and write more about what really touches you. It will touch me, too.
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