With that, he had the binding idea for his sixth collection of stories, coming in September in English as “Fly Already.” In many ways these sardonic and very short fables are the next installment in the series of strange scenarios cooked up in Keret’s brain since his first collection appeared in Hebrew in 1992. In the United States, they have made him into a cult darling for those who have heard him interpreted on “This American Life” or read them in The New Yorker.

Image “Fly Already,” published by Riverhead, comes out in English in September. Credit... Sonny Figueroa/The New York Times

These tales join the one about a man who discovers that his girlfriend transforms every night into a hairy, heavyset couch potato , or the one about a woman who finds that her lover has a zipper in his mouth hiding another man inside, or the one about the talking goldfish that grants its owner three wishes. They are absurd stories your stoned friend might unfold while giggling, but the best of them land at some insight into the human condition, all economy and charm.

This new collection, though, plumbs darker depths. They come from a place Keret, who is now 52, said he recognized in that moment of near death: a feeling of insignificance and dislocation, of not quite feeling there was a point to it all — in other words, middle age. But not just. Technological and social change has made us all feel ungrounded, he said, “like being in a rocket shot into orbit — I was in touch with the earth but everything seemed to be a little bit smaller and I couldn’t understand what people were saying.”

The weightier tone was noticed by the Israeli literary establishment, which has viewed Keret as the impish punk kid, a Tel Aviv trickster, madly popular but not quite serious enough. Though his work has been translated into over four dozen languages, from Croatian to Vietnamese (in Poland, an architect even designed what’s thought to be the narrowest house in the world and offered it to him as a gift), he has not received many honors in Israel itself. But in January this new collection won the Sapir Prize, Israel’s most prestigious literary award, with a commendation that noted how his characters “are connected to each other through alienation, loneliness, and a strong feeling of abandonment in the world.”