Joshua Cohen’s most recent novel is Book of Numbers.
On 18 May 1961, towards the end of Session 45 of the Eichmann trial, Judge Halevi asked State Prosecutor Bar-Or if he’d finished submitting into evidence all the documents relevant to the Theresienstadt camp. Bar-Or said he had, though of course there was also ‘the well-known book by Dr John Adler’: ‘This is the outstanding book about Theresienstadt, and it is...
What’s the German for a writer who resurrects a writer who would have hated him? Until a word is coined, I’m going to go with ‘Franzen’ – after the most famous American novelist of the moment, whose commercial and critical success has brought him, if his public statements are any indication, nothing but misery. His new book, The Kraus Project, returns him to the...
A prophet is wandering Samaria when he encounters a gang of children. They begin taunting him, pointing out his baldness. The prophet becomes enraged and curses them, and suddenly two female bears lumber out of the woods and maul the children, killing them. The prophet is Elisha, who inherited Elijah’s powers when the latter ascended to heaven in a fiery chariot. Kings 2.23-24 is the...
Worst. Movie. Ever. A woman visits a private detective and asks him to find her lost virginity. Or, let’s say, a time bomb has been planted in Midtown New York; our hero has to defuse it, but in his search discovers that the bomb is merely a metaphor symbolising his own fuming self. In the final scene, he jumps into the Hudson and drowns; the city is saved.
Metaphysics, if it can be...
The days of the phone book – along with print media, phone booths and landline telephones – are numbered. Leland Yee, one of San Francisco’s state senators, is responsible for much worthwhile immigration and domestic violence legislation, as well as mandatory ski helmets for children. This month he’s planning to introduce a bill prohibiting telephone companies from sending customers unsolicited white pages. White pages are residential listings, yellow pages commercial: neither name is protected by copyright so anyone can publish them. When I was a child, James Earl Jones did the TV spots for Bell Atlantic’s yellow pages: ‘No other book can match it,’ announced the voice I recognised as Darth Vader’s. No other book except the California State Law Code.
The American novelist Joshua Cohen arrives with the reputation of a wizard in the making, but his magic is as likely to blow every fuse in the house of fiction as transport it into a new...
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