Not long ago, Nathan Englander looked up at the ceiling in his twelfth-floor apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and saw something he hadn't noticed before. Another huge crack had spread across the plaster. It looked like the roof might give, like the water pooled up there might start dripping in, then pouring down, drenching him as he lay in his bed. How long had it been there? He had no idea. For years he had been sitting at his writing desk, looking out at the wooden water towers, the anonymous faces of buildings, the city that stretched into the distance, but he'd really been someplace else entirely, someplace far away.

As his ceiling cracked, as his phone was shut off, as letters to him went unanswered, and as old friends started to wonder whatever happened to Nathan Englander, the thirty-seven-year-old writer was living in a place that both existed and did not exist, a country that he both knew and did not know, and a time he both imagined and could not really imagine. He had been lost in a fictional world in Argentina—stomping around whores' graveyards in Buenos Aires, trying to track down the disappeared. He had been meeting with generals. He had been banging on government doors. He had been living in a country and a city and a community that had betrayed him. It was an ugly time. Argentina had become an ugly place, one that required a dark humor, a sense of the absurd and tragic, and a kind of hope that is woven through all of the worlds Englander creates.

It wasn't just his friends and the phone company who wondered where Englander had gone. The author burst onto the literary scene in 1999 with his short story collection, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, published by Knopf as part of a rumored six-figure, two-book deal. That first book was a collection of nine stories about Jews, Orthodox and not so Orthodox, and the lives they forge for themselves within their religion and the modern world.

For the Relief of Unbearable Urges was a national bestseller, exhaustively reviewed: Newsweek compared the young author's wit to Philip Roth's and Saul Bellow's, the Boston Globe mentioned Isaac Bashevis Singer, and the Village Voice noted similarities to Flannery O'Connor and James Joyce. The collection went through some thirteen printings in hardcover alone; it was translated into a dozen languages. All of this has led to high expectations for Englander's new book, about the Jewish son of a whore and his family living through Argentina's Dirty War in 1976; a book he started working on before his other collection was even finished; a book he spent his advance (and then whatever grants, loans, and teaching gigs he could patch together) to take the time he needed to really finish it. And now that it's finished, the world is waiting. They are asking about it in Germany. They are waiting for it in Italy. They are no doubt expecting it in Argentina. And this month, The Ministry of Special Cases (Knopf) has arrived.

The reception of For the Relief of Unbearable Urges was "beyond my wildest dreams," Englander says now. "You know, it was nine short stories, a collection of literary short fiction about Hasidim, and no, I did not expect…I couldn't have asked for more. People were very kind to me. I was just happy to have that kind of readership and kindness across the board."

All that kindness started a few years earlier, when he was studying at the Iowa Writers' Workshop and was sent to the airport to pick up Lois Rosenthal, editor of the now-defunct Story. "I had a clean car, and I was polite, so they used to send me to pick up the visitors," Englander says. During the ride, they were making conversation about the usual things when Rosenthal asked if he had any stories. "I handed her an envelope with three stories from under my seat. And she took two right then, and [later] published the third. So she ended up publishing everything in the envelope."

That first story, which would become the title story of his collection, appeared while he was still in graduate school in the Spring 1996 issue of Story alongside other then-unknown writers like Chuck Palahniuk (Rant, Doubleday, 2007) and Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love, Viking, 2006).

It was around that time that Englander also started to meet agents. Before long Nicole Aragi had snatched him up, and a few years later she would sell his collection to Knopf at auction for a reported advance of $350,000. While Aragi calls that sum exaggerated, she says, "It was a large advance, larger than is typical, simply because lots of publishers fell in love with the stories and could see how strong and individual Nathan's voice was.… There's always a lot of competition for big voices."

Whatever the exact figure, the advance proved to be a wise investment given the book's success, which was highly unusual for a short story collection. It was also well deserved, according to Colson Whitehead, the author of John Henry Days (Doubleday, 2001) and Apex Hides the Hurt (Doubleday, 2006). "We'd been playing poker together for about a year when I read For the Relief," Whitehead says, "and I was just blown away. It's always nice when you meet somebody and like them and think, ‘I hope I like their work, too.' The book is so spare and wise and generous. And the stories keep expanding page by page to contain much bigger worlds than you think from the start."

Julie Orringer, the author of How to Breathe Underwater (Knopf, 2003), remembers first seeing those stories years ago, in the mid-1990s, when she and Englander sat across the table from each other at Iowa. "Nathan was only twenty-five," Orringer says, "but the stories were already astonishingly good—he had a voice all his own; a wry, intimate storyteller's voice. His stories were unlike anything else I saw in the workshop, or have seen since."

Orringer remembers how Englander raised difficult questions about Jewish belief and identity, about the challenges of being Jewish in a Christian or a secular society, and about the devastating losses that haunt Jewish history. "I don't describe myself as a Jewish writer," says Englander, who chafes at being pigeonholed. "I write my stories, and they're about people. And I think that whole idea that you have to think of yourself as other is totally artistically destructive."

In fact, the caged-in feeling that permeates For the Relief of Unbearable Urges is something Englander knows well. "I was raised religious and gave it up," he says. "And I think that first book was really about this balance—the religious and the secular, the sacred and the profane, or however you want to break it down. It was about boundaries and balancing against these two worlds and where they come up against each other."

Fiction writer Colum McCann (Zoli, Random House, 2007), who shared an office with Englander at the New York Public Library's Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers from 2004 to 2005, explains the stories' appeal this way. "They're big and expansive and they dare," he says. "They're not small and mannered and housebroken like a lot of fiction is these days. He's aware of the cultural importance of the work, but he's not beating his chest. And there's a mythic quality, so they're not necessarily stories only for today. They're stories that seem to go backward and forward in time simultaneously. They seem to me brave and alive."

Nathan Englander grew up in "hypersuburban" Long Island, in a small place called West Hempstead, a few towns over from the "Long Island Lolita," Amy Fisher. But unlike her community, his was insular—he interacted solely with other (modern) Orthodox Jews. He went to yeshiva. He hung around and watched TV. And on the Sabbath, when the TV wasn't allowed, he read. Sometimes he would just sit and read a whole book, usually those assigned for English class: Camus's The Plague, Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Orwell's 1984. And as he read more and more, the more he fell in love with books and stories and the possibilities in them. "I was in a closed world," Englander says, "and I was suffocating in that world, and literature saved me—in the most pure form, where I had these ideas and thoughts and I found them in books. I really believe in the power of literature. I think there is no higher art form. I've always thought writing is the supreme form."

In 1989, during his junior year in college at Binghamton University, where he studied literature and Judaic studies, Englander went abroad to Israel. It was there he first heard a story he couldn't let go of. The more he thought about it, the more he wanted to complete it, to give it a proper ending. It was an account from Russia about Stalin executing twenty-six Jewish writers on the same day. To someone like Englander who loved books so much, the executions struck him as particularly brutal. Not only did the writers die, but all their stories died with them.

"These guys had the greatest story of their lives to tell and now it was gone," Englander says. "I thought someone should give them a story."

The idea stayed with him for a few years. He thought about it when he came home to New York. He thought about it while he put in hours managing a photography studio. He thought about it when he went back to Jerusalem in 1992 to pursue various summer photography projects. And it was there, sitting alone in his room with this story growing in his mind, that he realized photography wasn't his path.

"For me," Englander says, "that was the decision to write, in a sense, to touch this thing that I shouldn't dare. A real writer should give them this story. For me it was that idea. You know, I can write it in my room, and no one has to see it, but I'm going to give them this story."

Englander was just twenty-two and had written stories before, in college classes. But this was different. He could feel it as he started to picture these doomed old men and party hacks and unpublished poets no one had heard of; about how they were rounded up in an almost comic way, and how they argued, and how in the end they must have told each other stories.

As he kept writing, Englander decided to apply to MFA programs around the country. But first he needed to finish the story as his writing sample. Deborah Brodie, an editor at Roaring Brook Press and the mother of a friend of Englander's, agreed to help him as a favor to her son. They would meet and have dinner and talk about the story to try to wrangle it down from around a hundred pages to the twenty or so he needed. Almost as soon as they started, she saw something she rarely sees.

"I'm wrong about a lot of things," Brodie says, "but I know I'm never wrong about somebody having potential. I'm never wrong about recognizing a voice and knowing a person has the potential to be an amazing writer. And with him, you could see it in the raw material.

"At one point early in the process, I said to him, ‘I'm an editor, and I'm going to say something that I never say, because I can't control this and I would never promise something I can't be responsible for. But I'm telling you that not only are you going to get into Iowa, they're going to give you money.' And he said, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah.' Then he got into Iowa. And when they gave him money, he sent me flowers."

After reading his fiction, you might expect Nathan Englander to be a quiet soul, old on the inside, with his arms wrapped around the world's tragedies. But that's not the case. "Nathan is a serious writer with serious things going on. But in real life he's a funny, funny, funny human being," says McCann.

Englander talks fast. He goes off on rolling excursions that seem like tangents and come mysteriously around to the question you'd forgotten you asked. He is a one-man improv troupe with a thousand ideas competing for the stage. "His mind is always going a hundred miles a minute," says Whitehead. "He's taking everything in and processing it really quickly. It's hard to keep up with his witticisms and observations."

He's also self-effacing and modest about his achievements and about his work, which he sees as having its own life apart from his. "Out of all the emotionally tortured and screwed-up writers I met there," says Glen Weldon, a fellow graduate student at Iowa, "he was the most effortlessly funny. But there's also an utter seriousness to him."

Within two weeks of finishing up at Iowa in 1996, Englander found himself on the floor of the house of some friends, back in Jerusalem—the city where he would spend the next six years, working on his stories, watching helicopters take off from the Knesset when there was trouble, and hanging out in cafés hoping they didn't get blown up.

He found a tiny, cheap apartment where water dripped off the fixtures when it rained, and he scraped by until he got word that Aragi had clinched a two-book deal for the collection—which included "The Twenty-seventh Man," the story that Brodie had first helped him revise—and a novel, which by now he had already started.

"He works his ass off. He's wonderfully obsessive about the sound of a sentence," says McCann. "He sweats on the page," says Weldon. "He bleeds on the page and he does what he needs to do. And he'll go off and work on something, and rework it and rework it. That's the kind of discipline we're talking about. He understands the process in a way that not everybody does."

Once For the Relief of Unbearable Urges came out, Englander focused solely on the novel, which would take much longer to complete. "We have to sort of carbon-date it at this point," says Englander when asked how long he worked on it. "I found this old picture from Jerusalem, and in it you can see one of my notebooks, and you can see what I was working on. It's this novel!" Englander isn't even exactly sure when he started it.

"He wrote it first by hand on yellow legal pads," says Orringer, "stacks and stacks of which I'd see in his apartment when my husband and I came to visit. When the draft was finished, he typed it all on his computer, then rewrote it, then showed it to his first readers, then rewrote it again."

"I saw the process of him writing this book, which was [at least] a ten-year project," says McCann. "It's quite extraordinary, and I admired and envied that he could have such patience and endurance and time, to be honest, to work so single-mindedly. Because he really did nothing else."

However long it took to finish, the important thing for Englander's readers is that The Ministry of Special Cases is complete, and they can now see the years of work that went into it. The novel, which tells the story of Kaddish Poznan, bears many of the hallmarks of Englander's short stories—the same dark humor, the same pathos, and the same timeless feeling of being about everything and just one thing all at the same time.

But The Ministry of Special Cases is also wider and deeper and bigger than For the Relief of Unbearable Urges. It is a complete world that covers a vast territory and tells a seamless and alluring story: What does it mean to lose your past and your future? How can a father atone for his greatest failure? How do we choose events from our past to construct our present? What does it mean to be part of a community? What does it mean to love a place that betrays you?

These are some of the questions Englander started to wonder about during the years he lived in Jerusalem. Sometimes, he would hang out with a group of Argentine Jews who'd come to Israel looking for a better life, but who remained wholly, unapologetically, and enthusiastically Argentine, even if their homeland had broken their hearts in the worst way. It was a feeling Englander was beginning to grasp for himself.

"I love Jerusalem," he says now, looking back. "And more and more I identified myself as a Yerushalmi, a Jerusalemite. I wondered what it meant to love a city when its future is in so many different people's hands, and so many people are fiddling with it and fighting over it. I got really interested in the idea of loving a city and watching it crumble around you. That's how I got interested in the tragic love of city and of what's out of the individual's control. What is it to truly love a place?" It is a question that informs every page of The Ministry of Special Cases.

These days, aside from promoting The Ministry of Special Cases, Englander is on to other things: short stories he's been meaning to write, and some nonfiction, too. There's even another novel in the works. "For the last couple years I've been taking notes and sketching, and I have files and all that stuff," he says. "That's how I knew I might actually live to finish [The Ministry of Special Cases], when my brain started to free up space. I think something was let go."

But before he goes too deep into any new world, Englander will be spending some time in this one, doing some traveling, some public speaking. Maybe he'll even try to take a little well-earned time off. "It's been a long haul," he says. "It's been a decade of me just hammering."

For now, though, he's enjoying being back in the present, in his apartment, doing things like staring at his ceiling and wondering about all that he's left undone over the years spent writing his second book. He has left the Argentina of The Ministry of Special Cases behind with a mix of relief, remorse, fear, and elation, as well as a nagging sense that there's a lot to catch up on. Friends to be contacted. Bills finally to be paid. Cracks to be repaired.

Frank Bures writes for Tin House, Wired, Mother Jones, and other magazines. His work has appeared in The Best American Travel Writing 2004 (Houghton Mifflin). He is the books editor for World Hum, an online literary travel magazine.