Giv­en their range and quan­ti­ty, the thir­ty-plus sto­ries com­piled in Etgar Keret’s new col­lec­tion, Auto­cor­rect, con­sti­tute what feels like a jour­ney through not only the author’s mind but also his soul.

Keret’s fic­tion is doled out in swift, propul­sive blasts — some more rat­tling than oth­ers. In Auto­cor­rect, we blast through par­al­lel uni­vers­es, cyn­i­cal cos­mic game shows, sim­u­la­tions, and the afterlife.

In addi­tion, a num­ber of strik­ing sto­ries take place on earth as we know it. ​“A Dog for a Dog” sets three Jew­ish Israeli boys on a mis­sion of vengeance against an Arab man who acci­den­tal­ly killed their pet. In just a few pages, using the tem­plate of head­strong, fool­ish chil­dren, Keret indicts bib­li­cal wis­dom and its mod­ern antecedents. When one of the boys con­fess­es he doesn’t want to hurt the man’s dog, anoth­er boy says, “‘I don’t either. Believe me, I don’t. But if we don’t do it, if we don’t teach them a les­son, once and for all, it’ll nev­er end.’” The con­found­ing nature of vio­lence also fig­ures into ​“Cher­ry Gar­cia Mem­o­ries with M&M’s on Top,” in which a shell-shocked com­bat vet­er­an con­tends with his mother’s demen­tia. “‘I killed some­one,’” the char­ac­ter states. “‘That’s not trau­ma. That’s what sol­diers are sup­posed to do. I even got a medal of hon­or.’” Even Keret’s sci-fi doesn’t veer far from the world in which we’re liv­ing; they just hap­pen to involve aliens or time trav­el. One gets the sense that life has caught up with Keret’s vision — that ideas that once seemed star­tling (dig­i­tal com­pan­ion­ship, for exam­ple) are now ordinary. 

Through­out the col­lec­tion, Keret is as deft­ly — and dark­ly — com­ic, as read­ers famil­iar with his decades’ worth of writ­ing will have come to expect. In ​“Mitz­vah,” a promis­ing boys-day-out on drugs at the beach turns into trip­ping at the tem­ple when one char­ac­ter is recruit­ed into a minyan. Beyond their often absurd premis­es, Keret’s nar­ra­tives can digress with hilar­i­ous results. In ​“Gon­do­la,” for exam­ple, a char­ac­ter comes across a man named Oshik and observes that, ​“The only oth­er Oshik she’d ever known was her dad’s uncle, an insur­ance bro­ker from Netanya, and he was eat­en by a shark.” Com­e­dy pro­vides a release valve for the pres­sures of his char­ac­ters, who are fac­ing alien­ation, inse­cu­ri­ty, and decline. 

“Liv­ing is the eas­i­est thing in the world,” Keret writes. ​“Sur­viv­ing … that’s anoth­er sto­ry.” Our lives all fol­low the same basic arc: we are born, we live our lives as mor­tals, and, final­ly, we die. No sur­pris­es there. Yet the sim­plic­i­ty of this sequence, Keret seems to be say­ing, belies the bewil­der­ing, mys­te­ri­ous, deeply indi­vid­ual expe­ri­ence of being alive. How to rec­on­cile it all? How to rec­on­cile with an impos­si­ble rec­on­cil­i­a­tion? Auto­cor­rect feels like part of the process.