This story by Jessica Soffer from Granta last year, called "Beginning, End," seems to me to be a better and more pleasingly economical take on the same conceit at Jonathan Safran Foer's recent New Yorker story, "Here We Aren't, So Quickly." (Fun fact! Jessica Soffer recently received her MFA from Hunter, where Foer's spouse, Nicole Krauss, is an instructor. So maybe they both learned from the best!)

"Very rarely, a few times in a lifetime, you open a book and when you close it again nothing can ever be the same. Walls have been pulled down, barriers broken, a dimension of feeling, of existence itself, has opened in you that was not there before. To the End of the Land is a book of this magnitude. David Grossman may be the most gifted writer I've ever read; gifted not just because of his imagination, his energy, his originality, but because he has access to the unutterable, because he can look inside a person and discover the unique essence of her humanity. For twenty-six years he has been [...]