Dinner at the Center of the Earth

by Nathan Englander

disappeared, nameless American confined to a cell that doesn’t, on any written record, exist.

Prisoner Z

“If anyone’s tapping your phone, it’s him or

“Or the Russians,” she said. “Or the Americans or

French or your...

Brits. Anyway, it doesn’t ...

perfect place for an operative maintaining

low profile, and living under a simple cover, to

much greater angst, for those from his own. Swiping

and driven by his good-hearted intent to do what’s right.

combing through the files he’s dumped, the operations

he’s blown.

the ticking bomb that justifies so much of

misery we unleash.”

to even out was the Palestinians’. He was trying to make

amends for his sins.

Eight years in that

privilege of serving at

that spirits far more

removed than his have long, in this land, returned to advise. That before Heaven and before Hell, before those

newfangled Christian notions became all the rage, there was another place where souls r...

The good and bad penned up together wit...

and always within reach f...

It was a lesson in how power shifts.

that she was the one who could

the other

There is only the crack of the gun, the

one shot, one son.

Farid

mansion on Lake Wannsee.

manses of Am Sandwerder.

formerly landlocked and land-loving

loving Ramla family, refugees who’d been driven to Gaza

by the ...

to Berlin.

Japanese man

Takumi,

mix of Japanese politeness and fault-finding German

unspokenness, so different from the frank, no-nonsense

ways of Farid’s rough-and-tu...

last Intifada, in the long months

since the Israelis began leveling Gaza and the West

Bank,...

Joshua—“

could have kept their casino and their airport.

Dis. They could have had near everything they wanted. And they threw it all away.” “Sometimes, almost what you want

enough.” “Fair...

But that same General saved this country

certain destruction many times.”

make two states. He was going to make peace. A tactical choice as strategic and painful as war. Peace was