A preview of Graven Imaginings appears as part of the "Last Line" series in Esquire Magazine.
A review of Jack Kerouac's and William S. Burroughs' And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks appears in Time Out - New York.
An essay on Caravaggio’s The Taking of Christ (or, The Kiss of Judas) appears in The Believer.
An essay on the painter Soshana appears in Nextbook.
A review of Emmett Grogan’s Ringolevio: A Life Played for Keeps appears in Time Out - New York.
A story commemorating the end of the W. Bush presidency, entitled Reagan, Z., appears in 3AM Magazine:
It began as a neat little puff of what has been lazily and excessively called postmodernism. Reagan, fortieth president of the United States, had been an actor, too, and had served his debut presidential position as head of the Screen Actors’ Guild throughout the darkest days of the Hollywood Blacklist. Best known for his work as rookie corporate attorney and miscellaneous “fixer” Adam Luster in an otherwise forgettable hour-long, season-lived television drama, Z. was involved with the role that should have made his career. Thanks to an artificially complicated script written ten times over and revised by twelve hands, filming Gipper: The Ronald Reagan Story meant not only filming scenes from Reagan’s life but also filming scenes from Reagan’s own films, including this complicatedly comic moment from 1951’s Bedtime for Bonzo. This scene that unmade Z.’s career, then, can be thought of as a movie within a movie — itself a complex telling.
A review of Jed Perl's Antoine's Alphabet appears in Time Out - New York.
The Reading Experience (A Heaven of Others reviewed):
[...] this is a writer who will not necessarily pursue the same set of unconventional strategies (unconventional at first) but will produce experimental work in the purest sense: fiction that continues to surprise.
The 7/9 Forward features an extended essay on the aesthetics of Einstein's science, The Relative Arts (more Forward pieces, here):
Einstein’s discoveries and their peer achievements in the arts were inspired by the same secret, perhaps divine aspirations: to know the world in a new light; to listen to and see what was previously unable to be heard and invisible, and to read ourselves, by understanding consciousness as a human talent whose capacities for the creation of alternate spaces and times are shared with, or are the same as, the talents of the cosmos itself.
A review of Mircea Cărtărescu's Nostalgia appears in the New Haven Review.
Purist of the Self, an extended review of Henry-Louis de La Grange's four-volume, five-thousand page biography of Gustav Mahler, appears in the July 2008 issue of Harper's (available online to subscribers only).
A Heaven of Others is reviewed in The Buffalo News:
[...] one of the most provocative American novels in recent memory, not only in terms of its politics, but also its narrative eschatology in depicting an afterlife where the boundaries of consciousness and personal identity seem malleable. In an administrative mix-up of Old Testament proportions, the soul of young Jonathan -- seemingly linked to that of his killer -- is separated from his parents and ascends "on the wrong side of a wall, without a passport" to a strange heaven that is not governed by the rules of the Torah and Talmud and populated by Jews, but ruled by the Koran and Hadith and home to Muslim martyrs and their virginal houris. When finding passage to Olam Haba, the more conjectural afterlife of Judaic mysticism proves futile, his disembodied voice becomes the threnody of exile.
A Rough Guide to Tzaraat, a new essay on Scriptural skin disease, appears at Jbooks.com.
A new introduction to Michael Brodsky's The Bank Teller's Game is available here.
Two rediscoveries, from the Village Voice: on Zoran Živković, and Karel Čapek.
A rediscovery, from Bookslut: on Daniil Kharms.
A story, Pick Me Up, will appear in the next issue of The Agriculture Reader:
Like the airplanes that got me here, I am never picked up. It was too much like a movie. Women tend not to be so attracted. Not because I’m ugly, I’m not bad, but because I was born in a country where if you’re creative, if you’re great, even good, you’re broke, and if you’re broke, you’re broken, you’re unattractive, no one wants you, no one wants anything to do with you.
A Heaven of Others is reviewed in the April PopMatters:
Boldly [...] audaciously [...] A Heaven of Others is a contemplation of life's trivialities in the face of the unknown of death, and also an affirmation of the importance of those trivialities in making us who we are as individuals—something that doesn't last for very long, and should therefore be cherished.
The beauty of Cohen's writing is such that the tale is scripted in a dense, frequently punctuation-less poetry. One result of Jonathan's spirit reality is that his pronouns and am-ness have been exploded, as well. Time, space, and sense of being are rendered relative, even irrelevant, and with it much of the language we take for granted. Jonathan's attempts to speak from this perspective and retain the memories of his life result in a stumbling, cascading delivery coupled with an omniscient vocabulary beyond the grasp of a living child. The technique allows Cohen to write in feverish and metaphorical brush strokes, making this less a novel than a litany [...] Cohen's work here is brave, but perhaps more notable for its lack of judgment on today's world.
In the Beginning, There Was Vitebsk, about the Belarusian art capital, leads The Forward's Spring Books Issue, 3/19:
In the beginning, otherwise known as the year 988, Rus converted to Christianity, Vitebsk was founded and 1,000 years later, the Soviet Union collapsed, which was good. Today a backwater of fascist Belarus, Vitebsk had always been the place to change trains between Moscow and Kiev, its coordinates triangulating among the Russian and Baltic capitals of Vilnius and Riga. Due to this geography, and its three rivers — the Vitba and Luchesa flowing into the Dvina, which flows west toward the Baltic Sea — the city became a haven for traders, and as Jews could not work the land by law, Vitebsk became a haven for Jews. These Jewish merchants did what Jewish merchants have always done or should have, in all times, in all countries and cultures: They gave birth to Jewish artists, then supported their careers. As the Russian Revolution fired imaginations before the Bolsheviks turned repressive and, later, Stalin snuffed them with the gulag, these Vitebsk Jewish artists, and those Russians who gathered around them, re-envisioned the visual world.
Find more Forward articles here.
A story, Towards a New New York Protest, a Britished version of Toward a New Protest, has been published in a new anthology, 3:AM: London, New York, Paris, published by Social Disease here and in the UK:
For
as long as can be remembered, and despite, or in reaction to, our
patriotism, our public bravado, we have always had a private horror of
crowds, of masses and power. That’s why many of our countrymen live
alone, on much land kept safe by dogs that hate us and fences of wire.
Take heart, though: it’s not that we’re afraid, whether agoraphobic, or
anthropophobic, demophobic, ochlophobic, enochlophobic (there are too
many words, too many terms; more symptoms, or diagnoses, than
sufferers; more causes than there could be effects), it’s just that the
best of us have never quite trusted ourselves united behind one banner.
And that this might be the one quality, or flaw, that unites…
An essay "On Writing A Heaven of Others" appears in the February installment of Jbooks.com:
In the summer of 2004, I wrote a novel I called A Heaven of Others. Any synopsis makes it seem even more like the millennial fable I’d hoped it would be: A young Jewish boy is exploded by a young Muslim suicide bomber on a Jerusalem street. Through chance, divine error, or because the assailant embraced the boy so violently, Jonathan Schwarzstein (a German surname meaning “blackstone,” here meant to invoke the Ka’aba, the black stone of Mecca, and, also, a whiff of American magic) is whisked into the Muslim Heaven. He’s rewarded—as if a martyred murderer himself—with the virgins known as houris, and is pursued as an infidel by creatures torn from the bestiary of night; ultimately, he attempts to find the man named Mohammed, who is rumored to be able to restore him to the heaven of his own belief. Which is to say, the Jewish Heaven, just past “the Valley of Nails”… It’s still uncertain, though, both to the character and to me, his Jewish creator now three years older and wiser, whether that heaven, or any other, exists.
Download the original version here: JBooks_Heaven.pdf.
A Heaven of Others is reviewed in the February issue of the Brooklyn Rail:
[...] a spectral, largely soundless, beautifully
distorted journey through the Muslim heaven of mirages and monsters,
full of dreamlike misunderstanding and illogic [...] wonderfully
psychedelic prose supernovas [...] call it High Jewish Gonzo [...]
An interview regarding A Heaven of Others appears in the January 19th edition of The Forward.
Two Tribal Stories has been published in a limited edition by Small Anchor Press.
An excerpt from the first story, The Gesture:
To the best of my perception, to the best of my memory, the propitiatory gesture just then offered by the shaman consisted of the following:
an initial leftleg motion, at first barely perceptible but then the gesture entire might have been begun or begun itself long ago, began in the past forever distant though my own admittedly limited powers or power only acknowledged it at the sight of this slight slide of the shaman’s leftleg through the dirt, down, a drag into the earth, kicking a dig evenly with his heel, with regular shuffle, as if his leftleg and foot fused were a pendulum marking what I at first anticipated as a word — in their language, which I did not understand — then as words until I, and almost embarrassed (that is if they, the tribe, would understand embarrassment), realized that his leftleg had unearthed instead only a mouthlike but mute and so wordless trough in its steady swing, a leg now quickening its motion and higher with unflexed, inflexible knee to demarcate in its wide roll or torsion myriad orbits in the air at the height of his head
Awake! A Reader for the Sleepless (Soft Skull Press) has been published.
KGB LIT (Aleph-Bet: An Alphabet for the Perplexed, reviewed):
[Cohen's] final analysis makes the book all the more remarkable, since it comes not from a place of religiosity, but from the grand Jewish tradition of challenging engagement, and finally, from the love of questioning itself.
A Heaven of Others audio is here.
Its page on the Starcherone Books site is here.
The Literary Review (Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto, reviewed):
Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto is a wild, wide-ranging, freewheeling and ultimately lonely work that speaks to the most crucial aspirations of literary fiction's much-maligned "experimental" genre.... What distinguishes Cadenza from postmodern irony is the genuine compassion an observer will feel for Laster, despite his insistence on being both instrument and executor of his own destruction.... The impression of his gaze is as unavoidable and inevitable as the tragedy awaiting his cadenza's finale.
An excerpt from "Shabbos Dinner, with Letterforms," from Aleph-Bet: An Alphabet for the Perplexed, appears in the August 15th edition of The Forward.
A review of Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto appears in the August 2007 issue of The Believer.
Anecdotal Evidence (The Quorum, reviewed)
The Reading Experience (Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto, reviewed)
Bookslut (Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto, reviewed)
A story, On getting the sheets to stay on the bed... will appear in Awake! A Reader for the Sleepless, edited by Steven Beeber, Soft Skull Press, in Fall 2007.
A story, Image for an Unfinished Essay on Franz Kafka, was published for that writer's birthday, in Ed Park's The New-York Ghost.
Click below to read.
Montréal's Ox Family published a story this summer, It is said of Fu Kang... the entirety of which you can read, below:
IT IS SAID OF FU KANG…
Joshua Cohen
"It is said of the Emperor Fu Kang: that He, with eyes unflinching,
and a hand at peace, would have His enemies, and He had many, executed
by decapitation. Further, that He would have their heads scooped out,
embalmed then impregnated with magnet: the cavity that held the brain
would be filled with iron, mined in the furthest West. During His
ample leisure, He enjoyed tossing these magnetized heads at a metallic
surface. Actually, in later years, with His son gaining influence, His
Empire modernizing, and so falling to ruin, this metal surface was
often the door to an enormous refrigerator, then the largest to be
found in the universe (to open it required two teams of oxen, and an
equator of rope). Inside this fridge, the Emperor kept his foodstuffs,
luxuriously imported at our expense, at a temperature most
appropriate."
Manuscript Pages from A Heaven of Others
A story, Last Transmission, or Man with a Robotic Ermine, appears in the anthology, Text:UR - The New Book of Masks.
Fantasy fans looking for familiar themes and names among the 20
stories in Aguirre's boldly original anthology will be disappointed.
Those who like experimental fiction that's not always readily
accessible will be richly rewarded. Highlights include Nadia Gregor's
enigmatic "Faure, Envenomed, Dictates," Eric Schaller's hilarious
"Monkey Shines," Catherine Kasper's gently satiric "The Theater
Spectacular," and Joshua Cohen's breathless, fabulous split-sentence
split-thought confession, "Last Transmission or Man with a Robotic
Ermine." Aguirre, who won a World Fantasy Award for Leviathan 3 (edited with Jeff VanderMeer), demonstrates once again why he's one of today's more innovative genre editors.
Publishers Weekly