It’s not terribly hard to absolve those early readers for not recognizing that the self-described “terrible soldier” would go on to become a celebrated Israeli author, screenwriter and director. His sometimes fantastical and always off-beat writings differ markedly from earlier, canonical Israeli authors.

“In Israeli literature, the characters are always heroic and sure and responsible and moral—they are always better than me,” Keret said. But in his stories, there is ambiguity and uncertainty. Especially when it comes to love.

“Crazy Glue,” one of Keret’s most hauntingly beautiful tales, which is unforgivably omitted from this collection, begins with an adulterous husband who asks his wife why she bought special glue. “‘For the same reason I married you,’ she murmured. ‘To help pass the time.’” When he returns from work that evening, he can’t move a chair to sit in, open the door of the refrigerator, or lift the phone receiver to call the police. And then, he hears his wife, hanging upside down from the ceiling, laughing. He makes a stack of books to climb on and get his wife down, when he realizes:

She was so pretty, and so incongruous, hanging upside-down from the ceiling that way. With her long hair dangling downwards, and her breasts molded like two perfect teardrops under her white T-shirt. So pretty. I climbed back up onto the pile of books and kissed her. I felt her tongue on mine. The books tumbled out from under my feet, but I stayed floating in midair, hanging just from her lips.

Keret refers to the ambiguous end of the story as an example of the difficulties of love: “It’s beautiful and it’s lovely, but on the other hand, those people are hanging from their skin. It’s beautiful and horrible at the same time.”

The cover of his new collection of 21 short stories and a novella illustrates this philosophy graphically. A cartoon man with an enormous smiley face shoots himself with a handgun in the left temple as blood emerges from the right. It’s a startling visual collision of “Don’t Worry Be Happy” meets Columbine. Add in the collection’s novella about an afterlife for those who commit suicide, cheerfully entitled “Kneller’s Happy Campers,” and it seems fair to ask if Keret’s public should be worried about his obsession with suicide.