Epigram to Joshua Cohen’s The Quorum

It's the solstice tonight, and a good time to reflect on my favourite books from the past year.

I'm making very little attempt to rank these titles. They're simply the books that I enjoyed most, and they're presented in the order I read them. • "The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet," by Becky Chambers (2014) • "The Galaxy, and the Ground Within," by Becky Chambers (2021) • "Locklands," by Robert Jackson Bennett (2022) • "Beloved," by Toni Morrison (1987) • "Exhalation," by Ted Chiang (2019) • "Fugitive Telemetry," by Martha Wells (2021) • "Becoming Kin: An Indigenous Call to Unforgetting the Past and Reimagining Our Future," by Patty Krawec (2022) • "The Vanished Birds," by Simon Jimenez (2020) • "The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family," by Joshua Cohen (2021) • "Utopia Avenue," by by David Mitchell (2020) • "The Calcutta Chromosome: A Novel of Fevers, Delirium & Discovery," by Amitav Ghosh (1995) • "Moon of the Crusted Snow," by Waubgeshig Rice (2018) • "Bea Wolf," by Zach Weinersmith; illustrated by Boulet (2023) • "Fighting the Moon," by Julie McGalliard (2021) • "The Empress of Salt and Fortune," by Nghi Vo (2020) • "The Glass Hotel," by Emily St. John Mandel (2020) • "New York 2140," by Kim Stanley Robinson (2017) • "When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain," by Nghi Vo (2020) • "The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl Omnibus," by Ryan North et al; illustrated by Erica Henderson & Derek Charm & Jacob Chabot & Naomi Franquiz & Tom Fowler & Rico Renzi et al (2022) • "Buffalo Is the New Buffalo: Stories," by Chelsea Vowel (2022) • "Greenwood: A Novel," by Michael Christie (2019) • "The House of Rust," by Khadija Abdalla Bajaber (2021) • "Children of Memory," by Adrian Tchaikovsky (2022) • "Jade Legacy," by Fonda Lee (2021) • "A Deadly Education: A Novel: Lesson One of the Scholomance," by Naomi Novik (2020) • "The Last Graduate: A Novel: Lesson Two of the Scholomance," by Naomi Novik (2021) • "The Golden Enclaves: Lesson Three of the Scholomance," by Naomi Novik (2022) • "To Be Taught if Fortunate," by Becky Chambers (2019) • "Helgoland: Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution," by Carlo Rovelli (2020), translated by Erica Segre & Simon Carnell (2021) • "A Psalm for the Wild-Built," by Becky Chambers (2021) Ah, but I said I'd make "very little attempt" to rank them, not "no attempt." So here is that attempt: my favourite five books from the last solar orbit — the five I enjoyed even more than those other thirty — also presented in the order I read them.

• "Nona the Ninth," by Tamsyn Muir (2022) • "Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands," by Kate Beaton (2022) • "Record of a Spaceborn Few," by Becky Chambers (2018) • "Briar Rose," by Jane Yolen (1992) • "Babel, or, The Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution," by R.F. Kuang (2022)

Thoughts on Joshua Cohen? I stumbled across a reference to him in a Tao Lin novel recently and realized that I had entirely forgotten who he was besides that he was at one time supposed to be a somewhat big deal

Wrote about it here—can't get into him so far, but will keep an open mind. It seems as if I should like him. I think he is in one sense now a bigger deal than ever, having just won the Pulitzer and presumably become suburban ladies' book-club fodder or whatever, but less the glamorously marginal wunderkind.

Book of Numbers

By Joshua Cohen.

Design by Suzanne Dean.

Huge change of pace from Otherside Picnic but I'm enjoying this a lot so far.

Please join New Vessel Press for an in-person event with celebrated Israeli author Maya Arad discussing her first book translated into English, THE HEBREW TEACHER, with Joshua Cohen, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Netanyahus, on Monday, April 15, 6 p.m. at Shakespeare & Co. Booksellers, 2020 Broadway at West 69th Street, NYC. Haaretz calls Arad "the finest living author writing in Hebrew." Stay for wine afterward.

https://shop.shakeandco.com/book/9781954404236

“All of us are born how we are born and suffer how we suffer and if even God can’t make us equal who are we to think our laws can?”

Title: The Netanyahus

Author: Joshua Cohen

Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Review: This might just be one of the most bizarre books I’ve read this past year. As the latest installment in my Pulitzer reading challenge, this book had the memorable prose and unique characters I’ve found in almost all of the winners I’ve read thus far. However, the plot was wild, rendered even more so by the fact that it’s loosely based on a true story. As indicated by the title, the book is based on a real experience from the late 1950’s of Cohen’s old friend and mentor, the late Professor Harold Bloom. The story goes that Bloom was once asked by his university to coordinate the campus visit of an obscure Israeli historian named Ben-Zion Netanyahu, who showed up for a job interview and lecture with his wife and three children in tow and proceeded to make a mess. “Make a mess” is a bit of an understatement, but this sums up the premise of the plot. Contained within is an unmistakable parody of academia, a wistful exploration of the Jewish-American experience, and a scathing polemic of Zionism. As we follow main character Ruben and his family through the experiences surrounding their encounter with the infamous Netanyahus (which, yes, is directly related to that Netanyahu), we get a glimpse of the unique struggles historically encountered by the Jewish Diaspora in America. It’s deep at times, a bit slow at times, but it still keeps you engaged right up until the jaw-dropping events at the end. I definitely recommend this, especially at a time like now when America’s focus has shifted to the ongoing violence in Israel-Palestine, the discussion of the dark sides of Zionism, and the key distinction between people of the Jewish faith and people of the Jewish state.

Sample Quote:

《 Judy was cruel. She had the smart cruelty to her of someone who’d gotten what she wanted. And she’d gotten it the fairest way, through suffering. 》

NYT Article on the Book:

"I was merely trying to lighten the occasion by making a reference to circumcision."

The Netanyahus, Joshua Cohen

"Past Imperfect" by Joshua Cohen

The Past Can Be Imperfect #books #bookreview #reading #readerviews

Past Imperfect      Joshua CohenKasva Press (2023)ISBN: 978-1948403351Reviewed by Kenneth Onyenwe for Reader Views (12/2023) “Past Imperfect” by Joshua Cohen is an interesting mystery that tries to decipher the past of Mr. Mendel Kahn, who emigrated from Europe to America. This book begins during Yom Kippur when Jacob Gertner accuses Kahn Mendel of being a Nazi Kapo who brutalized inmates back…

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Joshua Cohen

Corbin College, not quite upstate New York, winter 1959–1960: Ruben Blum, a Jewish historian—but not an historian of the Jews—is co-opted onto a hiring committee to review the application of an exiled Israeli scholar specializing in the Spanish Inquisition. When Benzion Netanyahu shows up for an interview, family unexpectedly in tow, Blum plays the reluctant host to guests who proceed to lay waste to his American complacencies. Mixing fiction with nonfiction, the campus novel with the lecture, The Netanyahus is a wildly inventive, genre-bending comedy of blending, identity, and politics that finds Joshua Cohen at the height of his powers.

Do you see Joshua Cohen as an important figure in aesthetic writing now?

Hm, good question. He's objectively important, what with the Pulitzer and everything, but do I like him? I can't get anywhere with his work—I gave The Book of Numbers almost 50 pages, thought it was no more than clever; I don't find his essays any more insightful than anyone else's; I read the first page of Moving Kings (customarily lavish Ozick blurb on the back!) and asked myself why there wasn't one bit of human information but only a show-off rhetorical performance, this, again, on the first page of a novel—but I'm still not perfectly sure if it's him or me. Maybe just "not my aesthetic."

Holger Fock und Sabine Müller erhalten Paul-Celan-Preis

Der vom Deutschen Literaturfonds alljährlich vergebene, mit 20.000 Euro dotierte Paul-Celan-Preis für herausragende Übersetzungen geht in diesem Jahr an das Übersetzungstandem Holger Fock und Sabine Müller. Damit erhalten zwei verdiente Übersetzer:innen aus dem Französischen den wichtigsten deutschen Übersetzerpreis. Dass auch sie auf das Preisgeld angewiesen sind, haben sie erst kürzlich in…

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Tenser than any horror novel.