“Every time they would send me out to do pieces that are very clear cut for them—like it was a killer or something like that—I would come back with this very ambivalent piece. I would show his side and show empathy for him and it’s really not good for ratings, because to be good for ratings you need to be very one-sided.”

Keret says they didn’t lay him off only because “they really liked me and they really had this thought that if they would fire me I wouldn’t find any other job.”

But Keret not only found work in TV and books, he’s also made a showing in the motion picture world. He lectures at Tel Aviv University’s School of Film and has made a number of award-winning short- and full-length films.

His upcoming project is a film called $9.99, about a man who buys a book for $9.99 that he thinks will reveal to him the meaning of life. In Keret’s cinematographic world, the book actually does tell him the meaning of life.

As with any Keret work, there is a twist—the movie will use puppet animation. “The story has a very fairy-tale quality to it, I really wanted to mix fantastical elements with realistic ones, but I didn’t want the fantastic ones to stick out. But with puppet animation, all the strange things are normal,” he says.

* * *

It’s not often that an author’s name encapsulates the essence of his work, but due to his birth by caesarean section three months prematurely, Keret’s does. Because of his unusual birth—doctors said he would be still-born—they named him Etgar, which means “challenge” in Hebrew. His last name means “big city.” So his full name means “urban challenge.” “They can name sneakers after me,” Keret jokes.

But Keret’s work truly does address the principal challenge of modernity: how to connect and find meaning in a society where everyone is lonely and alienatedfrom one another?

“I see people that are more interested in life on soap operas than they are in their own surroundings,” Keret said. “These people care more about TV than they do about the homeless.”

His stories advocate not a withdrawal from the urban challenges of life, but a confrontation of them and an acquiescence to their existence in a world that still has boundless opportunities for happiness.

“It’s very scary to be a human being,” Keret admits. “But there’s also something very beautiful about it.”

Although his stories uncompromisingly describe the former aspect of mortal existence, they leave the reader with a lasting sense of hope in the veracity of the latter.

“They’re like commercials for life,” Keret says. “Life: you should try it sometime.”