Cohen, Joshua
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.
(1980- ) US author who after the surreal fantasias assembled as The Quorum (coll 2005) began to publish work of sf interest with "Last Transmission or Man with a Robotic Ermine" in Text: Ur: The New Book of Masks (anth 2006) edited by Forrest Aguirre. In his first published novel, Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto (2007), the composer Schneidermann mysteriously disappears from a showing of Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List (1993), according to his friend Laster who improvises the tale as a kind of cadenza to the composer's violin concerto. Schneidermann had earlier mysteriously survived the Final Solution (we are told) and must be somewhere now, caught perhaps in some trellis of Fantastika. In A Heaven of Others (2007), a young Jewish boy, victim of a suicide bomber, is sent by mistake to a version of the Muslim heaven, where his Fantastic Voyage in search of the right heaven foliates down distractive but educational paths. Similarly, in Witz (2010), an Alternate History Equipoisal between Eschatological spoof and Pandemia Sublime (see Pandemic), all the Jews in the world, with the exception of firstborn males, have died in 1999 at the verge of the Millennium; the firstborn, absorbed into the coils of the American government's true owners (see Secret Masters), all soon die as well, except for the New York protagonist, who seems to be an enfant sauvage, having been born fully adult but formally ineducable (see Absurdist SF; Postmodernism and SF). A parallel narrative, set in the "real" Near Future, describes the last days of the last survivor of the Final Solution.
Book of Numbers (2015), also gonzo and wit-led, is the biography of a "real" Internet guru named Joshua Cohen, as told from a coign of vantage somehow within the digital world he controls, by a man also named Joshua Cohen: who is whose Doppelganger is not entirely clear. The Joshua Cohen who narrates is unreliable. The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family (2021) confabulates a history of the Netanyahu family – the Israeli politician Benjamin Netanyahu (1948- ) plays a small role – through the eyes of Ruben Blum, an academic with almost the name but not the career of the American scholar and Media Landscape guru Harold Bloom: the connection is made explicit. [JC]
Joshua Aaron Cohen
born Somers Point, New Jersey: 6 September 1980
works (selected)
- Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto (New York: Fugue State Press, 2005) [pb/nonpictorial]
- A Heaven of Others: Being the True Account of a Jewish Boy Jonathan Schwarzstein of Tchernichovsky Street Jerusalem and his Post-Mortem Adventures in & Reflections on the Muslim Heaven: As Said to Me and Said through Me by an Angel of the One True God Revealed to Me at Night as if in a Dream (Buffalo, New York: Starcherone Books, 2007) [illus/pb/Michael Hafftka]
- Witz (Champaign, Illinois: Dalkey Archive Press, 2010) [illus/Nicholas Motte: pb/Danielle Dutton and Nicholas Motte]
- Book of Numbers (New York: Random House, 2015) [hb/Oliver Munday]
- The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family (London: Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2021) [pb/nonpictorial]
collections and stories
- The Quorum (Prague, Czech Republic: Twisted Spoon Press, 2005) [coll: pb/]
- Four New Messages (Minneapolis, Minnesota: Graywolf Press, 2012) [coll: pb/Alvaro Villanueva]
links
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