For the Relief of Unbearable Urges

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For the Relief of Unbearable Urges is a short story collection by Nathan Englander, published by Knopf in 1999. It earned Englander a PEN/Malamud Award and the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction. The collection contains nine stories, all set in the Jewish Orthodox world. The title story tells of a married Hasidic Jew who receives special dispensation from a rabbi to visit a prostitute – "for the relief of unbearable urges."