The Seven Good Years is a delightful collection of super short stories from the Israeli author Etgar Keret. Though some of the stories deal with traumatic topics - war, Holocaust survival, anti-Semitism, and grief - Keret finds a way to reframe them as events of curiosity, survival, and love. It is almost as if Keret refuses to forget the little moments in a day that make you chuckle and shake your head in amusement. Instead, he latches on and perfectly distills and expands the wonder of that moment.

I first heard Keret's stories on This American Life, and I found this collection every bit as wonderful as my introduction to his writing. I'm admittedly uneducated about Israeli and Jewish culture, so I didn't fully understand all of the references. Still, I think this book can be summarized by a quote from Keret's wife: "Our life is one thing, and you always reinvent it to be something else more interesting. That's what writers do, right?" A few favorites: "Big Baby," "Yours, Insincerely," "Flight Meditation," "Strange Bedfellows," "Fat Cats," Ground Up," "Love at First Whiskey," "Accident," and "Pastrami."