I was asked to review a new short story collection for Farrago; little did I know that reading it would force me to confront how much I’m willing to sacrifice to be a good person.

‘[redacted] is a genius. Dark and funny and weird and incisive and honest and magical and heartbreaking. He is truly original.’ -Francesca Segal, author of 'The Innocents’

Last year, as a reviews journalist for Farrago, I was sent a copy of Scribe’s new release catalogue and asked if there were  any titles I might be  interested in. This review for a new short story collection caught my eye immediately.

And Segal was right. It’s a brilliant collection. Some of the stories are hilarious; many are deeply, deeply moving. [redacted] consistently nails the art of tragicomedy, which I’ve rarely seen done right. The alternate realities he constructs are weird, original but oddly beautiful. His use of sci-fi or magical realist elements doesn’t feel excessive or out of place; it’s as if he only invokes them in order to breathe new life into the aspects of human existence that otherwise seem boring, irrelevant, or obvious. By making the scenarios in which they arise ever-so-slightly supernatural, a little abnormal, [redacted] makes you feel as if love, yearning, grief or regret are emotions being discovered anew by the reader. Like you’ve never really paid attention to them before, never seen how wonderful and impossible they are even though they’ve been there all along.

In the collection’s first story, A World Without Selfie Sticks, the protagonist’s girlfriend, Debbie, moves to Australia, but the next week he runs into her (or someone who he thinks is her) in a coffee shop. This woman, who he terms Not-Debbie, comes from another planet, where contestants on a game show are sent to other worlds and compete to discover the one thing that exists in their world which is missing from the new planet. It could be a selfie stick, waffle or lawn mower. The winner returns home; every other contestant must live forever on a foreign planet, never knowing if the game is still going or if they’ve lost. But Not-Debbie quickly gets attached to the protagonist, and is no longer certain of whether she wants to win, or stay on earth forever. This unexpected, instant attachment between these two people – is written with as much humour as it is imbued with sadness and beauty.

Some of the stories aren’t sci-fi or magical realism. Instead, they’re mundane snippets of life on earth, or otherwise exaggerated versions of it. One of my favourite stories was a biting, hilarious satire on capitalist hyper-efficiency, which becomes weirdly poignant by the end. It was one of the best short story collections I’ve read in a long time.

But reading it made me feel a bit guilty, and pretty conflicted.

Because a few weeks after I had ordered the book, before I’d read it, I Googled the author, and the first search result said that he lived in Israel. The second was a quote from him: ‘the moment that you say Israel is committing genocide, it means you don’t want to have a conversation.’

I felt equally shocked and disturbed. The United Nations has declared that a genocide is taking place in Gaza. To deny that fact is a further act of erasure and violence against the Palestinian people. I didn’t want to assume the author’s politics based on a single comment though. I researched further, and became less and less sure of his views.

In an interview for K. La Revue, he said that he ‘will not say that [Israel is] committing genocide, but [he] will say that it commits war crimes.’ His most recent op-ed for Le Monde, in August 2025, was decisively critical of Netanyahu. ‘The war in Gaza must stop now. It should have ended over a year ago, in the early months of the war, when there was an offer for a comprehensive hostage deal on Netanyahu’s desk. Stopping the war will put an end to the daily killing and starvation of Gazans, and bring the Israeli hostages home… [Netanyahu] continues to drag Israel into committing war crimes in the name of democracy.”’

None of the stories mention Gaza, but a few feature Israeli Defence Force soldiers as characters. One revolves around a character praying for over 24 hours, mostly for a wife and children, but also for ‘peace on Israel.’

I felt uncomfortable reading the stories that were heavily centred on the IDF or Israel. But knowing what I did about [redacted] didn’t change how much I loved the collection overall. It didn’t alter how attached I was to the characters, how devastated I felt as I read about their trials and tragedies, how funny I found their everyday problems.

If I could go back in time and choose not to read the book, I wouldn’t.
Athough denying that a genocide is taking place is deeply concerning to me, [redacted] isn’t a fervent supporter of Netanyahu or Israel. But that’s not really the point.

Rather than leading me to dissect his values, my experience of reading this book forced me to reflect on my own. My ability to read and enjoy [redacted] – a book created in Israel, which means that  money from its production is funding a genocide – made me wonder how much I’m willing to sacrifice my values in order to keep enjoying good art.

I’ve never believed that separating the art from the artist is possible. In my eyes – and it’s hardly an original take – stories stem from human minds and human feelings. They can’t be divested from the experiences that birthed them.

I also feel as though believing that art is created and exists in a vacuum limits the extent to which literature can function as a means of resistance, testimony or protest. There’s no meaning in James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time if the lines “they do not know Harlem and I do. So do you. Take no one's word for anything, including mine, but trust your experience” aren’t spoken by the author who has lived through those experiences.

And then there’s the practical dimension of it. By giving an artist money you fund their future actions. By praising them, you give them attention and increase their standing in the world, which is arguably more valuable than money. Even if you just privately read and enjoy a book of theirs, without ever  mentioning it to anyone, you’re giving their book life; you’re fulfilling the ultimate desire they had in writing it.

But if this separation isn’t possible, where does that leave me, an enjoyer of art made by ‘bad’ people?

Until now, I didn’t really feel as if I had a stake in the art-artist debate. It’s easy to say that you can’t separate the art from the artist until you fall in love with a book whose author’s views make you deeply uncomfortable. On some level, I must be separating [redacted] from his writing, if I can feel such disdain for his personal views and such love for his stories.

So, if it’s possible to enact this separation, that leaves the question of whether we should. The utilitarian argument is tempting – that art can be so good that it outweighs the suffering or horror needed to create it. But I don’t think I’d feel that way if I was living in Palestine right now, and [redacted]’s book money was funding the IDF.

Maybe, however, it’s more complex than that. Weighing the value of the art that has been produced against the extent of wrongdoing that went into creating it is practically impossible. Aesthetic value and ethical value are measured on different scales, in a sense; there’s no correlation between how good a piece of art must be for it to outweigh bad behaviour. No two people have the same sense of ethics, or the same taste in art either; so it’s difficult to measure either of them on their own scales, let alone together.

But I wonder if it would be worth looking at the ethical output of art, rather than just the ethics of its production. Essentially, whether it encourages good behaviour in those who consume it. Because even if art is created through wrongdoing or supports it, that doesn’t mean it can’t encourage ‘good’ actions in people who engage with it. In this way, rather than measuring aesthetic output against ethical input, we’re measuring ethical output against ethical input.

In this case, I didn’t just derive enjoyment from reading [redacted]. I think in a way, my experience reading it made me a better person, too. It forced me to confront my principles and how strongly I abide by them. It made me think deeply about the intersection of art and suffering, of artists and wrongdoing. I hope that I’ll be a more thoughtful consumer of art, a better critical thinker, because of that.

The most concrete effect this book had on me, though, is that it made me want to write. I felt inspired for the first time in a while; I changed my university subjects to enrol in a short fiction writing subject. And, importantly, just because [redacted] is the reason I’m writing again doesn’t mean that my writing will reflect his views or his subjects. I’m not going to write stories about IDF soldiers. I’m going to write about genocide and oppression. About politics. I hope that my writing will call out and discourage the kind of behaviour that [redacted] is indirectly supporting – even though, somewhat paradoxically, my impulse to write comes from his book. If I somehow created political change through my writing, would that justify my reading of the collection? I believe it could. I believe that it’s not about weighing art against evil – it’s about weighing the good that can stem from art against the evil that created or supported that art.

Or maybe I’m just a bad person; at the very least a weak person, trying to justify my complicity. Trying to justify the ease with which I set aside what I state to be my ‘values.’ The ease with which I ignore other people’s real-world suffering for the sake of a good short story.

I’m not sure. But I’m trying to engage with problematic art in a way that limits how much financial and reputational gain its creator receives – hence my decision to withhold the author’s name. I know I could choose not to engage with any remotely controversial literature at all. But I think that the lessons we can learn from not only the books themselves but the experience of reading them – the way we each, as readers, choose to engage with them, and what we discover about ourselves because of that decision – is too valuable to lose.