Shalom Auslander (Monsey, New York, 1970) was educated "like a calf" in an Orthodox Jewish community, that is, between half-invisible bars and in the most fearful respect for God.

As a child, he believed everything his elders told him about that powerful and abusive lord: Yahweh was everywhere, tempting his own with non-kosher food and, if they gave in, tortured them unspeakably. During adolescence, he continued to believe, and perhaps that is why he began to voluntarily and indiscriminately provoke the wrath of the heavens, which closely resembled the wrath of the father he had at home. Sober calf, Auslander spent a season in Israel, but this did not just tame him or return him to the fold. Still, he remains a devotee, although his Orthodox family believes he has turned his back on religion. I would like not to believe, but it does not succeed.

Now that he is an adult and a father, Auslander maintains the provocation by writing essays and fiction. And it never ceases to amaze him that Jews, Christians and Muslims react so badly to any criticism of their respective gods, for it is they who speak all the time about the excesses that such gods allow.

The author's first book of stories, Beware of God (2005), still unpublished in Spanish, earned him great critical recognition, as did Lamentations of a foreskin (2010). That is why it is very possible that God is upset with him.

Auslander writes regularly for The New Yorker, Esquire and The New York Times Magazine, among other publications, and lives in Woodstock, in the state of New York.