Etgar Keret’s mustache

That Etgar Keret, he’s a busy guy. First, he has a new collection of short stories, “Suddenly, A Knock on the Door,” which is being reviewed all over the place. Last month, he had a new story in The New Yorker, “Creative Writing,” about a couple’s insecurities and concerns following a miscarriage. And a few days ago, he had a short piece in the Lives section of The New York Times magazine titled “A Mustache for My Son,” which, like so much of Keret’s fiction, feels, and is, intensely personal.

We find out that his wife just suffered a miscarriage, his father has inoperable cancer and he, Keret, recently hurt his back in a car accident, but growing a mustache proves to be a great distraction from the difficult realities at hand. The hirsute patch becomes a conversation starter that elicits from his acupuncturist a hair-raising anecdote that forms the crux of this little offering.

With Keret, it’s always possible that one of the stories he writes — whether a piece based on his mustache or the recent story in The New Yorker — will become part of an eventual collection. As he recently told Heeb, “For me, basically what I do all my life, I write stories. I don’t write story collections, I just write stories. I think in each of my books there’s always one story where when I read it and say, OK, I’m working on a collection now. I’m not finished, I need to write a few more stories, but there’s something about that story that it makes me realize the other stories have something in common.”