Joshua Cohen (writer)

Last updated
Joshua Cohen
Joshua Cohen BBF 2010 Shankbone.jpg
BornJoshua Aaron Cohen
(1980-09-06) September 6, 1980 (age 43)
Somers Point, New Jersey, U.S.
OccupationNovelist, story writer
NationalityAmerican
Israeli
Education Manhattan School of Music (BM)
Period Contemporary
Genre Jewish, Literature, Speculative Fiction
Website
joshuacohen.org

Joshua Aaron Cohen (born September 6, 1980) is an American novelist and story writer, best known for his works Witz (2010), Book of Numbers (2015), and Moving Kings (2017). Cohen won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novel The Netanyahus (2021).

Contents

Life

Cohen grew up in Atlantic City, New Jersey, spent his summers in Cape May, New Jersey and went to school at Trocki Hebrew Academy before transferring to Mainland Regional High School. [1] He lives in Red Hook, Brooklyn. He reads both German and Hebrew and has translated works in both languages into English. [2]

Work and career

Cohen graduated from the Manhattan School of Music with a degree in music composition in 2001. [3] He does not have an MFA, and has expressed disdain for the degree, but has taught the course "Long Century, Short Novels" at Columbia University's School of the Arts's MFA program. [4] In 2017, Granta Magazine named him to its decennial list of the Best Young American Writers. [5] Cohen lived in various cities in Eastern Europe between 2001 and 2006, working as a journalist.

Cohen's works have received acclaim. Witz was named a Best Book of 2010 by The Village Voice. Four New Messages was named a Best Book of 2012 by The New Yorker. [6]

In an interview by Cohen for the Los Angeles Review of Books, Harold Bloom said, "Call It Sleep by Henry Roth, Miss Lonelyhearts by Nathanael West, Sabbath’s Theater by Philip Roth, and quite possibly your Book of Numbers are the four best books by Jewish writers in America. Your Moving Kings is a strong and rather hurtful book, but that helps validate it. Book of Numbers, however, is shatteringly powerful. I cannot think of anything by anyone in your generation that is so frighteningly relevant and composed with such continuous eloquence. There are moments in it that seem to transcend our impasse." [7]

Cohen's essays have appeared in Harper's , The New York Times , The New Republic , The New York Times Book Review , Bookforum , The Jewish Daily Forward , Nextbook , Tablet Magazine , Triple Canopy (online magazine) , Denver Quarterly , The Believer , The New York Observer , The London Review of Books , N+1 online , Guernica Magazine , and elsewhere.

In 2015, Cohen wrote PCKWCK, [8] a live-written novel.

Cohen was involved with writing the memoir of Edward Snowden, Permanent Record . According to Snowden, Cohen "help[ed] to transform my rambling reminiscences and capsule manifestos into a book.” The New York Times wrote: "It’s like a recursive loop of life imitating art imitating life; in Cohen’s Book of Numbers, published in 2015, a novelist named Joshua Cohen is hired to ghostwrite the autobiography of a mysterious tech billionaire ... whose search-engine company happens to be sharing information with government agencies." [9] The New Republic wrote: "Despite Macmillan’s black op to keep the book under wraps, over the past year, New York literary circles have buzzed with the news that novelist (and a contributor to The New Republic) Joshua Cohen had signed on as the famed whistle-blower’s literary interlocutor, traveling to Russia over the course of eight months to help Snowden, now 36, organize and improve his narrative." [10]

The Netanyahus won the 2021 National Jewish Book Award for Fiction [11] and the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction [12]

Bibliography

Novels

Collections

Stories

Date Title Publication Collected in Ref.
Feb 1
2011		Imaginary Appreciations of Myself as Hebrew Poet Guernica Magazine - [14]
Spring
2011		Emission The Paris Review 196 Four New Messages [15]
Jul
2011		Cafédämmerung (or Allen in Prague, King of May Day, 1965) The White Review 2 - [16]
2012 McDonald's Triple Canopy 16 Four New Messages [17]
Jul
2012		The College Borough Harper's (Jul 2012)Four New Messages [18]
Jul 1
2012		SentBomb Magazine 120 Four New Messages [19]
Dec 7
2012		Fat Tablet - [20]
Mar 3
2017		A Cinderella Story with an Immigrant Twist The New Yorker - [21]
Apr 25
2017		Uri Granta 139 - [22]
May 3
2018		Mall Camp, Seasons 1 & 2Granta 143 - [23]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jonathan Franzen</span> American writer

Jonathan Earl Franzen is an American novelist and essayist. His 2001 novel The Corrections, a sprawling, satirical family drama, drew widespread critical acclaim, earned Franzen a National Book Award, was a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction finalist, earned a James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and was shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award. His novel Freedom (2010) garnered similar praise and led to an appearance on the cover of Time magazine alongside the headline "Great American Novelist". Franzen's latest novel Crossroads was published in 2021, and is the first in a projected trilogy.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Richard Ford</span> American author

Richard Ford is an American novelist and short story author, and writer of a series of novels featuring the character Frank Bascombe.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Colson Whitehead</span> American novelist (born 1969)

Arch Colson Chipp Whitehead is an American novelist. He is the author of nine novels, including his 1999 debut The Intuitionist; The Underground Railroad (2016), for which he won the 2016 National Book Award for Fiction and the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction; and The Nickel Boys, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction again in 2020, making him one of only four writers ever to win the prize twice. He has also published two books of nonfiction. In 2002, he received a MacArthur Fellowship.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Susan Choi</span> American novelist (born 1969)

Susan Choi is an American novelist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nicole Krauss</span> American novelist (born 1974)

Nicole Krauss is an American author best known for her four novels Man Walks into a Room (2002), The History of Love (2005), Great House (2010) and Forest Dark (2017), which have been translated into 35 languages. Her fiction has been published in The New Yorker, Harper's, Esquire, and Granta's Best American Novelists Under 40, and has been collected in Best American Short Stories 2003, Best American Short Stories 2008 and Best American Short Stories 2019. In 2011, Nicole Krauss won an award from the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards for Great House. A collection of her short stories, To Be a Man, was published in 2020 and won the Wingate Literary Prize in 2022.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ben Lerner</span> American writer

Benjamin S. Lerner is an American poet, novelist, essayist, critic and teacher. The recipient of fellowships from the Fulbright, Guggenheim, and MacArthur Foundations. Lerner has been a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, among many other honors. Lerner teaches at Brooklyn College, where he was named a Distinguished Professor of English in 2016.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Daniel Alarcón</span> Peruvian-American novelist, journalist and radio producer

Daniel Alarcón is a Peruvian-American novelist, journalist and radio producer. He is co-founder, host and executive producer of Radio Ambulante, an award-winning Spanish language podcast distributed by NPR. Currently, he is an assistant professor of broadcast journalism at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and writes about Latin America for The New Yorker.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nell Freudenberger</span> American novelist, essayist, and short-story writer

Nell Freudenberger is an American novelist, essayist, and short-story writer.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Joseph O'Neill (writer, born 1964)</span> Irish novelist & non-fiction writer

Joseph O'Neill is an Irish novelist and non-fiction writer. O'Neill's novel Netherland was awarded the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Joshua Ferris</span> American author

Joshua Ferris is an American author best known for his debut 2007 novel Then We Came to the End. The book is a comedy about the American workplace, told in the first-person plural. It takes place in a fictitious Chicago ad agency experiencing a downturn at the end of the 1990s Internet boom.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lauren Groff</span> American writer

Lauren Groff is an American novelist and short story writer. She has written five novels and two short story collections, including Fates and Furies (2015), Florida (2018), Matrix (2022), and The Vaster Wilds (2023).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sana Krasikov</span> Ukrainian-born writer in the United States

Sana Krasikov is a writer living in the United States. She grew up in the Republic of Georgia, as well as the United States. She graduated from Cornell University in 2001 where she lived at the Telluride House, and from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. In 2017 she was named one of Granta's Best Young American Novelists. In 2019 The Patriots won France's Prix Du Premiere Roman Etranger prize for best first novel in translation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Benzion Netanyahu</span> Israeli encyclopedist, historian and medievalist (1910–2012)

Benzion Netanyahu was an Israeli encyclopedist, historian, and medievalist. He served as a professor of history at Cornell University. A scholar of Judaic history, he was also an activist in the Revisionist Zionism movement, who lobbied in the United States to support the creation of the Jewish state. His field of expertise was the history of the Jews in Spain. He was an editor of the Hebrew Encyclopedia and assistant to Benjamin Azkin, Ze'ev Jabotinsky's personal secretary.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gabe Hudson</span> American writer (born 1971)

Gabriel George Hudson was an American writer. His novel Gork, the Teenage Dragon was released by Knopf on July 11, 2017. Hudson's first book of fiction, Dear Mr. President, has been translated into seven languages, was a PEN/Hemingway Award finalist, and received the Alfred Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, and the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Samantha Harvey (author)</span> English writer

Samantha Harvey is an English novelist. She is the author of several critically acclaimed novels and has been shortlisted for various literary prizes.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chinelo Okparanta</span> Nigerian-American writer

Chinelo Okparanta is a Nigerian-American novelist and short-story writer. She was born in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, where she was raised until the age of 10, when she emigrated to the United States with her family.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ottessa Moshfegh</span> American author (born 1981)

Ottessa Charlotte Moshfegh is an American author and novelist. Her debut novel, Eileen (2015), won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and was a fiction finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Moshfegh's subsequent novels include My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Death in Her Hands, and Lapvona.

<i>Book of Numbers</i> (novel) Book by Joshua Cohen

Book of Numbers, published in 2015, is a metafiction novel written by author Joshua Cohen. The novel is about a writer named Joshua Cohen who is contracted to ghostwrite the autobiography of a tech billionaire called Joshua Cohen. It was published by Random House, and released in 2015.

<i>The Netanyahus</i> Winner of the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family is a 2021 novel by Joshua Cohen. It was awarded the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

References

  1. ↑ DeAngelis, Martin. "Former Cape May resident receives glowing reviews for 800+ page book, Witz", The Press of Atlantic City , July 30, 2010. Accessed January 23, 2018. "Joshua Cohen sits in front of his house in Cape May. Cohen, who grew up in Linwood and spent lots of summers in Cape May, has written a new novel, Witz.... Not bad bookish company for a kid who grew up in Linwood and Cape May, went to the old Trocki Hebrew Academy in Margate and then to Mainland Regional High School, and who worked some summers at his uncle's docks across the bay from Cape May - when he wasn't being a slot cashier at a few Atlantic City casinos or a semi-professional guitar player at gigs around Ocean City, Ventnor and more local spots."
  2. ↑ Alter, Alexandra (12 June 2015). "Nothing to Hide and Nowhere to Hide It in Joshua Cohen's Internet Novel". The New York Times. Retrieved 4 July 2015.
  3. ↑ "New York Observer".
  4. ↑ "A Nice Jewish Boy's Naughty Big Novel". Observer. 2010-03-31. Retrieved 2022-06-19.
  5. ↑ "Best of Young American Novelists 3". Granta (139). Spring 2017.
  6. ↑ Wood, James (December 17, 2012). "Books of the Year". The New Yorker.
  7. ↑ Cohen, Joshua (August 16, 2018). "Stories as Prayer: A Conversation Between Joshua Cohen and Harold Bloom". Los Angeles Review of Books. Retrieved 12 September 2020.
  8. ↑ "Joshua Cohen wrote a novel with the Internet reading over his shoulder". The Daily Dot. 18 October 2015. Retrieved 12 September 2020.
  9. ↑ Szalai, Jennifer (13 September 2019). "In Edward Snowden's New Memoir, the Disclosures This Time Are Personal". The New York Times. Retrieved 12 September 2020.
  10. ↑ Weinstein, Adam (17 September 2019). "Edward Snowden's Novel Makeover". The New Republic. Retrieved 12 September 2020.
  11. ↑ "2021 National Jewish Book Award Winners". Jewish Book Council. January 20, 2022.
  12. ↑ "2022 Pulitzer Prize Announcement". YouTube .
  13. ↑ Elkind, Dan (17 January 2008). "The Wrong Heaven: Critic Joshua Cohen on His New Novel". The Forward. Retrieved 12 September 2020.
  14. ↑ Cohen, Joshua (1 February 2011). "Imaginary Appreciations of Myself as Hebrew Poet". Guernica. Retrieved 12 September 2020.
  15. ↑ Cohen, Joshua (2011). "Emission". The Paris Review. Retrieved 12 September 2020.
  16. ↑ Cohen, Joshua (July 2011). "Cafédämmerung (or Allen in Prague, King of May Day, 1965)". The White Review. Retrieved 20 September 2020.
  17. ↑ Cohen, Joshua. "McDonald's". Triple Canopy. Retrieved 12 September 2020.
  18. ↑ Cohen, Joshua (1 July 2012). "The College Borough". Harper's Magazine. Retrieved 12 September 2020.
  19. ↑ Cohen, Joshua. "Excerpt from Sent". Bomb Magazine. Retrieved 12 September 2020.
  20. ↑ Cohen, Joshua (7 December 2012). "Fat". Tablet Magazine. Retrieved 12 September 2020.
  21. ↑ Cohen, Joshua (3 March 2017). "A Cinderella Story with an Immigrant Twist". The New Yorker. Retrieved 12 September 2020.
  22. ↑ Cohen, Joshua (25 April 2017). "Uri". Granta. Retrieved 12 September 2020.
  23. ↑ Cohen, Joshua (3 May 2018). "Mall Camp, Seasons 1 & 2". Granta. Retrieved 12 September 2020.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.