Nathan Englanders short fiction has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, and numerous anthologies including The Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Anthology, and the Pushcart Prize.

Englanders story collection, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges (Knopf, 1999), became an international bestseller, and earned him a PEN/Faulkner Malamud Award and the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Englander was selected as one of "20 Writers for the 21st Century by The New Yorker. He was awarded the Bard Fiction Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and, in 2004, he was a Fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. He lives in New York City.