The Barnes & Noble Review: Your characters are always running into people they know — someone’s grandma or dentist. There’s a sense that people are yoked closely together. How much is this the result of hailing from a small nation, or does it predate Israel and perhaps smack of a shtetl sensibility?

Etgar Keret: It is a very Jewish thing to know everybody. It is impossible to become a serial killer in Israel because everyone you try killing will be in the end the brother or the cousin of someone you went to school with.

BNR: Would you be a very different writer if you’d been raised in America, where we sometimes fancy that we have six degrees of separation, as opposed to Israel, where there seem to be only two or three?

EK: What do you mean “two or three”? If I don’t know the guy personally he must be an Iranian mole.

BNR: In several of your stories, your male characters are always having sex “on the side” almost as a matter of course. Is that how it is in Israel today?

EK: Why? You are considering immigrating? When I write about adultery I mostly use it as a metaphor. Living comfortably with something that is immoral and problematic is, sadly, very human and yes, it is also very Israeli.

BNR: This book arrives with a lot of P.R. hoopla — even something called an “Etgar Keret Art & Design Contest.” Is that fun for you or a drag?

EK: A few weeks ago my mother called my home while I was giving an interview. My wife told her I couldn’t take her call because I was working, and my mother corrected her, saying that talking to somebody about yourself isn’t exactly work. P.R. is fun most of the time, and when it isn’t it is something slightly unpleasant you are doing for something you really believe in, which is a much better deal than most people get.

BNR: In the story “A Good One,” you suggest that some airline passengers befriend their neighbors solely so that they can appropriate the armrest. Are you cynical?

EK: I hope I’m not, but I am very ironic. The big difference between irony and cynicism (at least the way I use these terms) is that cynicism is built on alienation, while irony can make fun of things but at the same time can be also empathic and warm. It is the difference between making a joke about a total stranger and making one about your mom.

BNR: Is your intention to move readers, to amuse them, to cast things in a different light for them, or what?

EK: It’s “or what” for certain. Writing never has a pragmatic purpose for me. It doesn’t have any purpose, at least not one which I’m able to grasp or articulate.

BNR: Do you ever know how a story will end before you start?

EK: I never know what is going to happen in my story. The strongest drive I have for writing is curiosity. I write like a reader who … wants to know what will happen next. When the first draft ends I many times change the structure but when I first write it, it is a complete mystery.

BNR: Have you achieved the proper amount of success for your talent? Not too little, not too much?

EK: I don’t think anyone deserves success. It is like a gift and when you get one, you don’t weigh it, you just say “thanks.”

BNR: Some reviewers have detected anger in your work. I get wistful bemusement. Am I missing something?

EK: Oh, I am angry, but not with you. You are nice.

BNR: But maybe I’m just a naturally shallow person.

EK: There is nothing natural about being shallow.

BNR: Was that a dumb thing for me to say?

EK: It wasn’t, and you are not shallow.

BNR: Reviewers sometimes use violent expressions to describe your writing. It “swings around and hits you in the back of the head” (Tikkun); “whaling at the ice with a Wiffle ball bat” (the Forward). If you were reviewing yourself, what imagery would you use?

EK: “Massages you with aromatic oils”? “Embraces you with hairy warmth”? Man, I’m not good at this.

BNR: Your male characters have been described as “trapped in stasis,” but I see them more as floating upside down in midair like in a Chagall painting. Do either of these ring true?

EK: I think both are true. Believe me, one has to be trapped in stasis for a very long time to start floating upside down in midair.

BNR: How much do you polish?

EK: A lot, for much, much longer than I actually write.

BNR: You don’t strike me as a particularly tortured person. Care to comment?

EK: Thanks. I have already learned that I pass as very happy and easygoing in email interviews.

BNR: There’s a sense of effortlessness to your stories, as though they easily flow out of you. Do you ever get the feeling readers or reviewers resent that?

EK: A reader once told me disappointedly, “I could have written those stories,” and I answered, “But you don’t need to, I’ve already written them for you.” When it comes to writing I try not to sweat a lot, and when I do I try my best to hide it.

Carvalho is at the center of 19 novels, many of them set in post-Franco Spain. His youth and his glory days are behind him. As one character in “The Angst-Ridden Executive” observes, they were “the best years of our lives — if you leave aside the political persecution, the brutality … and the darkness ruling the country.” Such cynical humor peppers this lean thriller in which Montalbán strikes the perfect balance between European cerebral and American noir. He also reins in the lengthy political and philosophical digressions that deflate other Pepe Carvalho novels: “Murder in the Central Committee,” for example, and to a lesser degree “The Buenos Aires Quintet.”

“The Angst-Ridden Executive” may be dark but it is also sprightly, shuttling as it does between the USA and Spain while Carvalho investigates the death of Antonio Jauma, a Spanish industrialist. By chance, he knew the man. Carvalho and Jauma once met on a transatlantic flight, discovered tastes in common, and shared an unlikely American road trip with an enigmatic German business associate of Jauma’s. Now Carvahlo recalls scenes from this American odyssey — California, for example, with its “beautiful Anglo Saxons, white as the sand on the seashore, and always casually dressed, as if life for them was always casual” — as he attempts to track down the businessman’s murderer. He is assisted, as usual, by Biscuter, a rough Catalan version of Jeeves, and by Charo, a prostitute girlfriend, both of whom are more cartoon figures than characters.

The novel’s murder suspects, however, and even its minor corporate and political figures are convincingly menacing, while the murder mystery itself is complex but not outlandish. It leads Carvalho not only into the past — an inevitable destination in post-Franco Spain — but almost prophetically into the future. This may be the 1970s, but the riots in the streets, the desperation of the poor, and the combined heft of the state and the corporation seem eerily familiar. “Democracy cannot permit the use of a strong hand,” a loutish entrepreneur tells Carvalho, “but in order to succeed it needs terrorism in the background, a dirty war, which drives people into the arms of stabilizing forces that appear to have clean hands.” And this, it turns out, is where the key to Jauma’s murder lies: in the foul territory ruled by corrupt politicians and patrolled by uniformed thugs, the seasoned variety who have the ability “to pass from a blow to the forgetting of that blow in an instant, in the confidence that the person on whom it landed has no choice but to play along.” Another breed that Montalbán seems to have known only too well.

Dovlatov has a disarmingly honest voice, and he doesn’t muck about with pretense. There’s black humor in the assorted shenanigans of the prison guards, but you have to reread some passages to determine just who was doing the guarding, and who was doing time. Guards and prisoners hang out, even if the latter sometimes try to kill their captors, but they also try and kill their own kind, so there’s a weird, backward kind of equality at play. For anyone hung up on whether this is fiction or nonfiction, Dovlatov, billing himself as “The Author,” declares that “all the fictionalizing was unexpected and accidental.” So you’re on your own then. Still, this is not the work of a trickster, and an earnest tone prevails throughout, even when sheep are sodomized or men get high on a noxious form of stewed tea. The sheep romancer is granted a degree of sympathy — less so may be said for the animal, perhaps — and the convicts who wouldn’t mind shanking you will at least offer you a loving cup of their bilge. Cheers all around.

The longest vignette is more of a short story, served up almost out of a sense of guilt that the incidents thus far presented have been too fleeting, although that seems a case of writerly — either on Dovlatov’s part, or that of his stand-in — paranoia. “Let there be at least one relatively whole section of the book,” they declare. And so follows one of the great mash-ups of modern Russian literature, with the narrator setting off to another camp to bring back a prisoner noted for his performances as Lenin in various convict productions. If ever the high camp of a Marx Brothers script was crossed with the subdued, internal landscapes of Chekhov’s “The Steppe,” the result would fall within the bounds of this chapter. As soon as you’re doubled over in laughter, something gutting follows, before it’s back to the laughter, and then another jolt of pain. After a while, it becomes difficult to tell where one emotion stops and the other begins, leaving each of us to try and navigate a zone of our own.

King, author of “The Execution of Willie Francis,” observes that Florida, despite its “boundless capacity for racial inhumanity,” was considered “south of the South”; it had somehow managed to escape the scrutiny of, say, Mississippi or Alabama (site of the similar and better-known Scottsboro Boys case of 1931) despite recording more lynchings than any other state. Within hours of the Padgetts’ claim, three suspects — World War II veterans Sam Shepherd and Walter Irvin and teenager Charles Greenlee — were being held for the crime. Hundreds of men stormed the jail, clamoring for a lynching. When the mob was turned away, crowds descended upon black Groveland, shooting into houses and burning down the home of Shepherd’s father, who had managed to buy land to farm independently rather than working in the citrus groves, as blacks in rural Lake County were expected to do. A fourth suspect, Ernest Thomas, escaped into the swamps, only to be later caught and killed by a large mob.

“The American justice system was wholly stacked against powerless blacks,” King writes, and the bulk of the narrative concerns the appalling twists and turns of the legal case against the defendants, known as the Groveland Boys. Under the brutal interrogation of Lake County Sheriff Willis McCall, all three were beaten and whipped until they confessed to the crime. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, having monitored the disturbing news reports about the case from the beginning, decided to become directly involved. The defense was handled first by Franklin Williams and eventually by future Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall, who was by then already a celebrity known as “Mr. Civil Rights.” With the white supremacist Sheriff McCall and the Ku Klux Klan holding a tight grip on the county, Williams, Marshall, and the other black attorneys and reporters who traveled to and from central Florida to work on the case risked their lives to do so.

Williams later described the first trial in unreal terms, as “a story that I was living through,” replete with a stiflingly hot courtroom, a judge who whittled cedar sticks throughout the proceedings, and hostile white spectators crowding the benches. To this day it is not at all clear that a rape took place, but the NAACP lawyers had to find ways to defend the Groveland Boys without ever hinting that a white woman, even one known around town as “a bad egg,” might be lying. Despite prosecutorial misconduct and extremely weak evidence, the three defendants were quickly found guilty, with Shepherd and Irvin sentenced to death.

The NAACP appealed all the way to the Supreme Court, which in 1951 overturned the convictions and ordered a retrial, calling Florida’s discriminatory handling of the case “one of the best examples of one of the worst menaces to American justice.” But the case took a nightmarish turn when Sheriff McCall, transporting Shepherd and Irvin from death row to their retrial in Lake County, shot the two men multiple times on a deserted back road, claiming they had tried to escape. Shepherd died instantly, leaving only the wounded Irvin to be represented by Marshall at his retrial. Irvin was promptly convicted and sentenced to death a second time, but after some dramatic maneuvering by Marshall, which included his barging in on a card game between Chief Justice Fred Vinson and President Harry Truman and convincing Vinson to sign a stay of execution, his sentence was eventually commuted by Florida’s governor.

There is much that shocks in King’s wrenching account, from the small indignities, like the prosecutor mistaking the black lawyers for the defendants, up to the monstrous crimes. These include not just the highly suspicious killing of Shepherd by McCall (who managed to continue what King calls his “reign of terror” as sheriff until 1972, despite 49 separate investigations of misconduct charges) but the subsequent murder of Harry Moore, killed along with his wife when their house was bombed. Moore, the first civil rights leader to be assassinated in the United States, was the NAACP’s executive secretary in Florida and a tireless advocate on behalf of the Groveland defendants. Nobody was ever charged in the Moores’ deaths.

Throughout the book, the author periodically widens his focus to explore the case’s broader context, noting that the alleged rape gave McCall and his deputies “an excuse to do some heavy housekeeping with regard to black troublemakers and potential instigators.” Their list would have certainly included returning veterans like Shepherd and Irvin and independent farmers like Shepherd’s father — all viewed as “uppity” by whites who tolerated blacks in Groveland only so long as they understood their place, providing cheap labor for the white-owned citrus groves.

King also provides insight into Marshall’s long-range legal strategy of chipping away at injustice. He fully expected to lose jury trials in the South, but you fought, he explained, “so that you lived to fight another day,” by establishing grounds for appeal. Just before arguing the landmark Brown v. Board of Education, Marshall emerges as a heroic figure, facing great risk with courage and gallows humor. King writes that “there is not a Supreme Court justice who served with Marshall or a lawyer who clerked for him that did not hear his renditions, always colorfully told, of the Groveland story.” While the case, until now, has been mostly forgotten, Marshall, for good reason, never forgot it.

“Another Time, Another Life” begins on April 24, 1975, with an actual event, the takeover of the West German Embassy in Stockholm by members of the Baader-Meinhof gang in an attempt to force the release of their leaders being held for trial in Germany. Police arrive at the scene and lay siege to the building, whereupon the occupiers shoot and kill first one and then another of the German members of the embassy staff. They promise to shoot more, one an hour, until their demands are met. The standoff is brought to a fiery end — here and in history — when one of the gang members accidentally ignites the explosives they’ve brought with them. The remaining hostages escape without further harm, two of their captors are killed, and the rest, though injured, are quickly shipped back to Germany. Thank God.

What had happened was definitely not a cheerful story, but in the general misery the government could be happy that public opinion was united behind them. In addition, for once the goodwill was shared by the populace and the media. The man on the street was, to put it simply, furious. The whole thing was very un-Swedish, and at the same time it was typical for the Germans to foist their problems on their peaceful neighbors — something the Germans unfortunately had been in the habit of doing for far too long. In brief, you got the terrorism you deserved, and besides everyone who had been abroad in winter knew that the Germans always push ahead in the lift lines at the most popular ski resorts, despite the fact that these were in Austria and Switzerland.

Persson excels in evoking a mood with this sort of sardonic riff, in the present case capturing a very Swedish form of self-righteousness and hand-washing and elsewhere of bureaucratic self-aggrandizement and official temporizing. In the same vein, he records throughout the disparaging inner commentary of various members of the police and secret service as outwardly they mouth routine waffle. The salient fact about the Sweden of Persson’s novels — darkly comic at times, sinister at others — is that a great deal goes on below the surface. Coverups abound, individually and nationally: Past involvements are tucked away — or tick away — starting with roles played in the Second World War and the Cold War and moving on to the violent radicalism of the 1960s and 1970s.

In the case of the embassy affair, it is clear that the German invaders must have had Swedish accomplices, people who had housed and fed them at the very least. The secret police are handed a few leads, but, really, this incident in all its “un-Swedishness” and unexpectedness is not the sort of investigation they favor, “in contrast to activities you initiated and guided yourself in the form of surveillance, infiltration, and the organized gathering of information through telephone monitoring, other types of eavesdropping and radio surveillance.” The increasing autonomy and self-defeating proactiveness of the security forces in Sweden is a theme that runs through these novels.

Now we zoom ahead to November 1989 and the discovery of a murdered man in a Stockholm apartment building. The month also marks the fall of the Soviet Union and the dissolution of its power in the Eastern Bloc — and, more to the point where this story is concerned, to the opening of East Germany’s secret-police files. There are many, Swedes among them, who know that the infamous records kept by the Stasi will reveal some of their own more regrettable activities. Could it be that the murder victim is among them? Not in the opinion of the detective inspector put in charge of the case, a loathsome creature called Bäckström, a glutton and a sot whose overwhelming foulness was such a treat in the first volume. It is clear to him, despite all evidence to the contrary, that the murder is the result of a homosexual imbroglio. He is assisted in his incompetence by another loser of our acquaintance, Wiijnbladh (first names are in short supply in these pages), whose chief goals in life are avoiding work and, more ambitiously, killing his wife. This worthless duo is the despair of a couple of other old friends from the first volume, Bo Jarnebring and Lars Johansson, whose lives we have followed back and forth in time.

Once this murder case has been thoroughly bungled, we move on to the year 2000, at which juncture a number of chickens come home to roost (and we have the great pleasure of learning what life has handed the many characters we have come to know). It is at this point, too, that Persson’s true genius becomes evident, and that is his cunning in conflating his plot with history’s, for seating fictional events in a force field created by powerful economic interests and global Realpolitik. Need I say that a CIA operative is involved? But his manipulations are only one strand in a splendidly convoluted denouement that, were it not fiction, would simply have to be true.