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Joshua Cohen

    January 1, 1951

    Joshua Aaron Cohen is an American novelist and short story writer. His work delves into the profound complexities of human existence and the intricacies of contemporary life. Cohen is recognized for his distinctive prose style and his ability to draw readers deeply into the inner worlds of his characters.

    Four New Messages. Vier neue Nachrichten - Four New Messages, englische Ausgabe
    Witz
    The Best Assassination in the Nation
    The Netanyahus
    ATTENTION!
    British Antifascism and the Holocaust, 1945-79
    • The book examines the impact of the Holocaust on British antifascist movements from 1945 to 1979. It delves into how the memory and lessons of the Holocaust influenced political activism and public sentiment against fascism in Britain, highlighting key events, figures, and ideological shifts during this period. Through a detailed analysis, it reveals the complex relationship between historical memory and contemporary political action in the fight against fascism.

      British Antifascism and the Holocaust, 1945-79
      5.0
    • You've paid money for this book, or you have family or friends who don't mind your borrowing or who gift books like this. You are being attentive because you're interested in what type of person this gifter thinks you are - too attentive, to them, to yourself, or too inattentive.

      ATTENTION!
      4.0
    • The Netanyahus

      • 240 pages
      • 9 hours of reading

      WINNER OF THE 2022 PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION 2021 NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD WINNER A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2021 A WALL STREET JOURNAL BEST BOOK OF 2021 A KIRKUS BEST FICTION BOOK OF 2021 "Absorbing, delightful, hilarious, breathtaking and the best and most relevant novel I’ve read in what feels like forever." —Taffy Brodesser-Akner, The New York Times Book Review 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.

      The Netanyahus
      3.8
    • The Best Assassination in the Nation

      • 324 pages
      • 12 hours of reading

      "A triumphant debut! Crisp prose and rich characterizations... Fans of classic P.I. novels will hope for more from Cohen." ― Publishers WeeklyBenjamin Gold is damaged goods. After he cracked up in the war and was discharged into a psych ward, his rich wife dumped him. Right after that, the white-shoe law firm that never hired Jews dumped him too; without powerful in-laws, it didn't matter how many cases he won or how much he shortened his name. Unemployable as a lawyer, he wound up working as a private eye—and not exactly at the top of the profession. Drunk and anorectic, his only remaining friends are bartenders and bottles.After a long string of jilted wives and small-time scams, Gold isn't expecting the beautiful daughter of his legal hero to show up in his office. Especially not with a crazy theory that her father—recently shot dead, supposedly in a random robbery—was in fact assassinated by order of Cleveland's biggest tycoon, Clayton Forsythe.To prove Judith Sorin's case, Benjamin Gold has to navigate a web of lies and evasion, a legal establishment that's been bought and paid for, disappearing witnesses, the FBI, surprisingly polite thugs, and the Forsythes—who just happen to be his former in-laws. A tall order for anyone, and Benny Goldstein has never been lucky...

      The Best Assassination in the Nation
      3.6
    • Witz

      • 817 pages
      • 29 hours of reading

      On Christmas Eve 1999, all the Jews in the world die in a strange, millennial plague, with the exception of the firstborn males, who are soon adopted by a cabal of powerful people in the American government. By the following Passover, however, only one is still alive: Benjamin Israelien; a kindly, innocent, ignorant man-child. As he finds himself transformed into an international superstar, Jewishness becomes all the rage: matzo-ball soup is in every bowl, sidelocks are hip; and the only truly Jewish Jew left is increasingly stigmatized for not being religious. Since his very existence exposes the illegitimacy of the newly converted, Israelien becomes the object of a worldwide hunt . . .Meanwhile, in the not-too-distant future of our own, “real” world, another last Jew—the last living Holocaust survivor—sits alone in a snowbound Manhattan, providing a final melancholy witness to his experiences in the form of the punch lines to half-remembered jokes.

      Witz
      3.5
    • A quartet of audacious fictions that capture the pathos and absurdity of life in the age of the internet A spectacularly talented young writer has returned from the present with Four New Messages, urgent and visionary dispatches that seek to save art, sex, and even alienation from corporatism and technology run rampant. In "Emission," a hapless drug dealer in Princeton is humiliated when a cruel co-ed exposes him exposing himself on a blog gone viral. "McDonald's" tells of a frustrated pharmaceutical copywriter whose imaginative flights fail to bring solace because of a certain word he cannot put down on paper. In "The College Borough" a father visiting NYU with his daughter remembers a former writing teacher, a New Yorker exiled to the Midwest who refuses to read his students' stories, asking them instead to build a replica of the Flatiron Building. "Sent" begins mythically in the woods of Russia, but in a few virtuosic pages plunges into the present, where an aspiring journalist finds himself in a village that shelters all the women who've starred in all the internet porn he's ever enjoyed. Highbrow and low-down, these four intensely felt stories explain what happens when the virtual begins to colonize the real -- they harness the torrential power and verbal dexterity that have established Cohen as one of America's most brilliant younger writers

      Four New Messages. Vier neue Nachrichten - Four New Messages, englische Ausgabe
      3.2
    • Vier neue Nachrichten

      • 270 pages
      • 10 hours of reading

      »Bei diesem literarischen Start-up möchte man von Anfang an dabei sein und keine Zeile verpassen!« New York Times»Vier neue Nachrichten« - gesendet von einer neuen, aufregenden Stimme aus den USA. Der junge New Yorker Autor Joshua Cohen, der schon jetzt mit Thomas Pynchon und David Foster Wallace verglichen wird, zeigt, wie radikal das Internet unseren Umgang mit Sex und Arbeit, Familienleben und Zukunftsplänen, unsere Art zu schreiben und unsere gesamte Identität verändert hat. Die »Vier neuen Nachrichten« handeln von einem halbherzigen Drogendealer, der durch einen Blog im Internet bloßgestellt und in einen Strudel eskalierender Ereignisse gezogen wird; sie führen die Ödnis heutiger McJobs und deren platte Sprache ad absurdum; sie karikieren ein Schreibseminar an einer Provinzuni, das unter Anleitung eines gescheiterten New Yorker Professors zu einer grotesken Übung wird. Die Nachricht »Gesendet« ist eine unheimliche Parabel über Internetpornografie, osteuropäische Mädchen und die Schattenseiten des vermeintlichen Fortschritts. Der New Yorker nennt Joshua Cohen »eine Entdeckung«, seine Texte »hochintelligent: lyrisch und prosaisch, theoretisch und praktisch, komisch und ernsthaft zugleich«. Cohens virtuoser Sprache hat der für seine David Foster Wallace-Übersetzungen hochgelobte Ulrich Blumenbach eine kongeniale deutsche Stimme geliehen.

      Vier neue Nachrichten
      3.8
    • Auftrag für Moving Kings

      Roman

      • 288 pages
      • 11 hours of reading

      This is a novel about two young Israeli soldiers who travel to New York after fighting in the Gaza War and find work as eviction movers. It’s a story of the housing and eviction crisis in poor Black and Hispanic neighborhoods that also shines new light on the world’s oldest conflict in the Middle East. The year is 2015, and 21-year-olds Yoav and Uri have just completed their compulsory military service in the IDF. In keeping with national tradition, they take time off for R&R: a gap-year spent abroad. They come to America and begin working for Yoav’s distant cousin, David King—a proud American patriot, Republican, and Jew, and the owner and operator of King’s Moving Inc., a heavyweight in the Tri-State area’s moving and storage industries. Yoav and Uri now must struggle to become reacquainted with civilian life, but it’s not easy to move past their militarized selves when their days are spent kicking down doors, working as eviction-movers in the nongentrified corners of Brooklyn and Queens, dispossessing delinquent tenants and homeowners who’ve defaulted on their mortgages. And what starts off as a profitable if eerily familiar job quickly turns violent, when they encounter one homeowner who refuses to leave.

      Auftrag für Moving Kings
      3.0
    • Die Netanjahus

      oder vielmehr der Bericht über ein nebensächliches und letztlich sogar unbedeutendes Ereignis in der Geschichte einer sehr berühmten Familie

      • 288 pages
      • 11 hours of reading

      Winter 1959-1960: Ruben Blum ist Historiker und der einzige Jude am nördlich von New York gelegenen Corbin College. Wie er immer wieder betonen muss, ist er deswegen jedoch noch lange nicht auf die Geschichte des Judentums festgelegt. Am liebsten würde er sich auch vor der heiklen Kommission drücken, bei der es um die Bewerbung eines Kollegen aus Israel geht, doch der Dekan hat ihn zur Teilnahme verdonnert. Da dieser Ben-Zion Netanjahu gleich seine ganze Familie zum Vorstellungsgespräch mitschleppt, wird Blum auch noch unfreiwillig zum Gastgeber. Die Netanjahus mit ihren drei verzogenen Söhnen fallen in sein Haus ein wie eine Plage, und bald gerät Blums mühsam errungene Akzeptanz im amerikanischen Mainstream in Gefahr. Der mit dem Pulitzer-Preis ausgezeichnete Campusroman Die Netanjahus nähert sich dem Thema jüdische Identität auf originelle Weise. Joshua Cohen verwandelt eine wahre Begebenheit im Leben der berühmten Politikerfamilie mit überbordender Fantasie und wilder Komik in ein literarisches Feuerwerk.

      Die Netanjahus
      3.7
    • Ein gescheiterter Autor verliert am 11. September alles, was ihm am Herzen liegt: Seine Frau verlässt ihn, sein Buch floppt, der Buchladen, in dem er sein Geld verdient, liegt in Trümmern. Da erhält er den lukrativen Auftrag, die Memoiren eines Mannes zu schreiben, der genauso heißt wie er und ansonsten sein genaues Gegenteil ist: Ein Internetmogul, Erfinder des Algorithmus, der die totale Überwachung ermöglicht und unser aller Leben verändert. Autobiografie, Familiengeschichte, Ghostwriting für Anfänger, Silicon-Valley-Historie, internationaler Thriller, Sexkomödie - Buch der Zahlen ist ein überschäumendes Buch und in Amerika Kult.

      Buch der Zahlen
      2.8