Etgar Keret’s Autocorrect: A Singular Voice Spins Tales for Our Times

No writer does more with less than Etgar Keret.

The acclaimed Israeli purveyor of micro fiction returned in 2025 with Autocorrect. Across thirty-three stories, translated from Hebrew by Jessica Cohen and Sondra Silverston, Keret doesn’t so much reflect reality back to us as he does refract it, bend it, and mess about with it—and, in doing so, turns the ordinary into the absurd and the absurd into the comprehensible.

Autocorrect opens in classic Etgar Keret territory: a place we can recognize (an East Village Starbucks), a scenario that falls just this side of plausible (the narrator meeting the doppelgänger of his ex-girlfriend), and a title that’s a bit of a feint on what to expect from the pages ahead (“A World Without Selfie Sticks”).

From there, the story travels the path trodden by so much of Keret’s best work, straining our credulity a degree at a time before returning to a place that’s no longer quite as recognizable as we first imagined.

That doppelgänger? She’s “Not-Debbie,” a TV game show contestant from a parallel universe in search of the one difference between her world and the narrator’s. The first player to name the disparity gets whisked back to their world as the winner of a million-dollar prize. Failure to do so means remaining in the narrator’s world, never knowing whether the game is afoot or abed.

Fantastical, yes, but also typical of Keret’s taking readers on a joyride through the outlandish. “It all felt too incredible to be a lie,” the narrator says of the situation, “and Not-Debbie spoke with such sincerity that I just had to believe it.” Likewise, Keret writes with such candid specificity that I can forgive myself for feeling the same way about the author: his stories lean whacky and weird, and I’m totally up for that.

I remain so as the story loops back toward the recognizable world where it began—after the narrator has a fling with Not-Debbie and helps her win the contest. Before long the original Debbie returns; she and the narrator reunite, marry, and eventually have children.

And I’m still up for it when Keret, as he often does, ends the story not with a punchline but with a curveball. Those children we meet in the final sentence, they’re “Zack and Deborah Junior.” And in a story that turns on the tiniest of differences—a single word separating one universe from another—the placement of “Junior” stands out. Maybe it’s merely a nontraditional choice for a girl’s name, maybe it’s Keret being cheeky, maybe it’s a clue that assuming we share the narrator’s reality is a risky business. Or maybe it’s something else entirely. The point is, instead of concluding with the sort of tidy, reconciling bow that plagues so much short-short fiction, Keret offers something new to consider beyond the story’s final period.

“A World Without Selfie Sticks” is the first of many stories that engage with the malleability of reality. In “Gondola,” the love-seeking Dorit silently acquiesces to living the lie that her lover, Oshik, is already married (he isn’t). In “Zen of Beginners,” the narrator follows his yoga instructor’s advice to “learn how to let go” and stops worrying about his apartment moving first to the other side of the building, then to a building across the road, and finally to the top floor of that second building. Each character, in their own way, accepts the uncanny not just to get along but to end up better off than when the story began.

The questions of reality and agency feel most urgent when paired with another of the collection’s themes: technology and the bargains, good or bad or both, that humanity strikes with itself when presented with a new capability. In “Point of No Return,” we encounter layers of imperfect simulations; in “Soulo,” AI–human twins and the end of our species; in “The Future Is Not What It Used to Be,” a time-travel-as-weight-loss scheme; and in “Polar Bear,” a bored AI overlord that abandons us, turning off the world’s lights on its way out.

But it’s in “Undo,” one of Autocorrect’s gems, that the expression of this theme feels most salient and its effects most direct. Here, humanity has decamped to the metaverse, coaxed by promises of great wealth, ideal weather, and even more ideal looks. For all that perfection, though, the metaverse proves a deeply imperfect place, precisely because the version of humanity that inhabits it retains the same desires and foibles and failings of the humanity that inhabited the physical world.

Small wonder then that the introduction of an “undo” function, “a lousy feature meant to improve user experience,” leads to devastating consequences. The ability to Ctrl-Z thirty seconds into the past proves a temptation too great to resist.

Choosing the wrong words, dropping a coffee pot, running over a pedestrian: all valid reasons—though to varying degrees of importance—for a person to seek a do-over. But the wider and unconsidered consequences of those individual choices utterly jam the gears of existence: if time is constantly being rewound, it’s definitionally not moving forward.

What the metaverse developers designed to save “trillions of insults, apologies, accidents, and laundry loads” leaves humanity in limbo, “dancing an endless tango with time: a few seconds forward-mistake-regret and a few seconds backward, grinding every moment into dust.”

The way out? “Thirty seconds without screwing up, that’s all it’ll take to lift the curse. Thirty seconds without hurting, without disappointing, without causing pain to one another.” But surely there’s another solution: humanity could stop using the undo function and live with imperfection. Those odds, though, may be even slimmer than thirty seconds of peace.

As deftly as Keret’s stories speak to the here and now, none of his collections would feel complete without also contending with the hereafter. For decades, Keret has entertained his readers with tales of heaven, subverting classical representations with ones that amplify the flawed mundanity of life among the living. Those spaces have served as fertile ground for his myriad creative strengths. Indeed, in “Present Perfect,” heaven amounts to waiting in a never-ending line to nowhere, much to the consternation of one Giora Shviro, who on Earth never encountered a queue he couldn’t pay his way to the front of.

Disappointingly, there’s no equivalent subversion of hell (see the following interview for why).

“Mesopotamian Hell”—in which “the dead are allowed to say anything they wish once they get there, but they can say each sentence, phrase, or word only once”—would seem a perfect jumping-off point for Keret. Yet what follows, no matter how intriguing, amounts to three paragraphs that skim a descriptive surface, more of an idea toyed with than a story told.

“It was some hell, those Mesopotamians had,” Keret writes in the final lines. Fair enough, but also all the more reason for Keret to explore that space as he does so adroitly in his stories about heaven. Instead, there’s the sense of an adventure withheld. And that’s an odd outcome from Keret, who so often pushes his characters, his stories, and his readers into places that, given the choice, they’d likely rather not go.

Yet the missteps are few in Autocorrect. In its fullness, the book shines as a remarkable collection of inventive tales, deep feeling, and resonant thinking, hallmarks of Etgar Keret’s long and decorated writing career. When his stories invite us to wrestle with big questions—the nature of reality, human agency in an AI-dominated world, the costs/benefits inherent in relationships—they do so with a wit and humor that cut against fear and anxiety. And, in these times especially, thank goodness for that.

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A Conversation with Etgar Keret

Born in Ramat Gan in 1967, Etgar Keret is a leading voice in Israeli literature and film. His books have been published in over four dozen languages and his writing has appeared in The New York Times, Le Monde, The New Yorker, The Guardian, The Paris Review and Zoetrope, among others. Keret teaches creative writing at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, and is the founder and director of a new MFA in creative writing at the Jewish Theological Seminary. Over a hundred short films and several feature films have been based on his stories. He has received the Book Publishers Association of Israel’s Platinum Prize several times, and the Newman Prize for Literature (2012). In 2010, Keret was named Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France. In 2007, Keret and Shira Geffen won the Cannes Film Festival’s “Caméra d’Or” for their movie Jellyfish, and Best Director Award from the French Society of Dramatic Authors and Composers. They also wrote and directed The Middleman (2019), a French mini-series for ARTE, which won the best screenplay award at Festival de la Fiction in La Rochelle. In 2016, Keret was awarded the Charles Bronfman Prize. His collection Fly Already won Israel’s prestigious Sapir Prize (2018) and a National Jewish Book Award (2019). In 2022, Keret presented an exhibition about his mother at the Jewish Museum Berlin. He writes the weekly newsletter “Alphabet Soup” on Substack, and his latest short-story collection, Autocorrect, appeared in 2025.

Fiction Editor Chris Edmonds and Etgar Keret conversed via email to discuss the craft and inspiration behind the stories included in Autocorrect. The interview was edited for clarity.

 

STORY

You write these quirky, punchy delights that, despite how sadness and death and loneliness permeate them, are often wickedly funny. Reading Autocorrect, and rereading earlier collections, feels like taking momentary diversions from a world gone mad. Thank you for that. But, also, given the times we live in—Gaza, Ukraine, Trump 2.0, among so many crises—how do you view these stories in today’s context?

ETGAR KERET

You’ve called the stories “momentary diversions from a world gone mad,” but for me I almost feel as if it is the other way around: my entire being feels, many times, in a constant attempt to avoid the rigid and irrational reality all around us, and it is only on those rare lucid moments of writing that I actually take on reality and not just suppress it.

STORY

I’m curious about how you approach the humorous and somber tones in your work, balancing or playing them off each other. Would you talk about the difference between a first and a final draft in terms of how these elements surface?

ETGAR KERET

I never try to write funny. I try to write honestly, and the attempt to tell the truth stresses me so much that my way of dealing with that pressure is to crack a joke. I always say that humor is like an airbag in a car. The airbag never comes with an on button, and you can’t control it, but you do know that whenever you’ll be in great danger that airbag will be there to protect you.

STORY

Technology—from AI to simulated reality to the metaverse—is everywhere in Autocorrect, and it doesn’t do your characters much good. Like, the ability to rewind existence in “Undo” sounds great…until we start using it. What’s your level of anxiety around tech? Are you afraid of where we may be headed? Or where we already are?

ETGAR KERET

I’m not afraid of technology. I’m afraid of human greediness and shortsighted perspectives that would make us use our technological resources in a damaging way. Imagine a sixty-year-old person who gets a golf cart as a birthday gift and uses it every time he or she gets out of bed. A golf cart, as Donald Trump would agree, is an amazing invention, but if our friend uses it consistently, he will, within a couple of months, lose his ability to walk. When it comes to technology, people should always ask themselves both what they get from a technology and, at the same time, what they are sacrificing for it: their agency, their tolerance, their ability to listen and to empathize. It is like having a cake: it is great to have it, but it is also important to understand the effect it will later have on you.

STORY

Interestingly, with tech we encounter fictious versions of what exists in our world (e.g., we have chatbots, but we don’t have one quite like Sigmund in “Polar Bear”), but elsewhere, we encounter COVID and October 7 by name. What goes into the decision of placing your characters within an actual event or approaching reality obliquely, more allegorically?

ETGAR KERET

I intuitively prefer the allegorical approach, but sometimes certain circumstances, like the 7^th of October, grab you by your throat and make it difficult to bypass their concrete existence.

STORY

Let’s talk about the afterlife. There’s no celestial bliss in your heaven, but there’s plenty of boredom and bureaucracy, like the endless waiting in an aimless line in “Present Perfect.” Why present heaven this way, and why keep revisiting it?

ETGAR KERET

Heaven always exists in our mind as some kind of a promise, a trump card, a way out of life’s impossible maze of anxiety and loneliness. I also want to believe that such a place or an option exists, but to be able to grasp it, I need to take it off its pedestal and stone wash this hope a little. And in a strange way, scarring and dirtying this obscure hope a little only makes it more plausible and real.

STORY

And what about hell? Even though it appears in Autocorrect, hell—at least in the canonical sense—isn’t a place where characters spend a lot of time in your stories; why is that?

ETGAR KERET

The concept of a world full of bliss in which everything makes sense fascinates me. Thinking of a place of punishing and suffering seems much easier and much closer to our world. I’m not claiming that we are living in hell, but I do think that hell as a concept is something that is much more familiar and clearer to us than the idea of heaven.

STORY

This life or the next, death is a fixture across your stories. Do you ever start a story and think, “Okay, Etgar, no one’s dying in this one”?

ETGAR KERET

I don’t kill that many of my characters, but I do kill a few. The moment in which one leaves the world of the living is a very reflexive moment in which you are both an insider and an outsider to life. I am not attracted to it because it’s a life-and-death drama but more for the neither-here-nor-there perspective that it can offer.

STORY

One of the pleasures of reading your stories is how familiar their realities often feel…only that they’re knocked off kilter, sometimes by a little and sometimes by a lot. Take the opening sentence to “Gondola”: His Tinder profile said his name was Oshik, he was thirty-eight, married with no kids, looking for a serious relationship. In a sense, the full Etgar Keret experience in four clauses. But how do we get here? What in your reality calls forth this more bonkers one?

ETGAR KERET

When it comes to understanding the world around me, I always feel a bit uncertain. It doesn’t matter if it is a news report, a political speech, or a petition against or for something—there is always something in it I don’t understand. My entire life experience feels like I’ve been heading down a bumpy road, trying at each stage to hide my confusion and hesitation. When I write a story I do the opposite: instead of trying to ignore this bump, I jump head on to it, trying to dive into the bottom of that confusion.

I am always intrigued and confused by the way in which people present themselves on dating apps. It always reads like empty clichés, a plane in which it is almost impossible to present yourself as unique or, at least, as different. This is the challenge that began this story, which is, for me, about our need to compromise with reality sometimes, and that it is a good thing, even in our uncompromising my-way-or-the-highway age.

STORY

In different contexts across the collection, a character being precise about what they say and how they say it has the potential to unlock a reward: winning a reality TV contest, sleeping with a beautiful tourist, giving solace to grieving parents. And I wonder: to what extent can a translation of your work maintain the nuance of your original Hebrew text?

ETGAR KERET

It is very difficult to keep the tone of a story in a different language. What I love about Hebrew colloquial speech is that it can be at the same time biblical and full of pathos, contemporary and nonchalant. This mixture of half-ancient and half-hype is something that doesn’t work in any other language and has to do with the special Captain America frozen-in-an-iceberg tale of the Hebrew language. A language that was “frozen” for two thousand years in which people didn’t speak it, only read it, and it didn’t evolve but has become a living, spoken language again only in the last two centuries.

STORY

You’re a master of very short fiction—flash, nano, pico…whatever you want to call it. Do you ever think about going long? Like, is your Moby-Dick kicking around in your imagination and just waiting to come out? Or is a few thousand words your limit?

ETGAR KERET

I said once that writing for me is like exploding and that I haven’t found a way yet to explode slowly. The bottom line is that writing fiction, for me, is always a trust fall—trying to find a place in which I can lose control of a text and in this process find some truth. I can also enjoy writing differently and in a more structured way, but somehow, when I choose this path, that longer writing is in the form of a script or a play and not a work of short fiction.

STORY

I love “Strong Opinions on Burning Issues” as a skewering of hot-take culture. But if I can ask you for a hot take before we wrap up: which story in the collection is your favorite and why? Not the one you find the most meaning in or had the best time writing, but the one you finished and thought, “Ah, I could read this one forever.”

ETGAR KERET

I think that what usually makes me like a story is the feeling that it succeeds in naming something that had existed unnamed in my universe until that moment. I think that “A World Without Selfie Sticks,” which opens Autocorrect, is a story that does just that, naming that feeling of powerlessness and confusion that I’ve experienced ever since COVID started five or six years ago.