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Quorum
Because we shouldn't believe in nations, because we have forsaken our traditions or our traditions have forsaken us, because only individuals matter to those who happen to be one ... because everyone has their own voice and we're all speaking at once, connected through a disconnect and yet still insisting on our fundamental differences, that we're special, marked by virtue of our sheer existence ... Because of all these paradoxes -- screaming into each other through any ear and enacting a love-death in the gray middle -- how can we truly expect to listen when we want only to be heard? But what is there to say that hasn't already been ignored? -- these are some of the ideas that this book does not address.
Joshua Cohen has performed in-depth investigations into mirrors and navels to return with The Quorum, his first collection of short fiction. A set of ten stories, a set of dreams, and a long monologue, these are all first-person rants given over by the somehow alienated, individuals seeking only a sympathetic hearing, all dealing with identity and religion as well as occupied with technical ideas of reliable narration and the structure of the mind's ear. From a review of a book about the Holocaust that's six-million blank pages to a suicide note from a young university student, from a letter to home outlining an economy based on hair to a eulogy for a poem, from a story narrated by three-hundred concubines to the title story about a group of people who interchange appearances, habits, proclivities and talents, The Quorum is a sensitive and inevitably absurd take on the individual's lifelong quest to get someone, anyone, to listen.
Joshua Cohen has performed in-depth investigations into mirrors and navels to return with The Quorum, his first collection of short fiction. A set of ten stories, a set of dreams, and a long monologue, these are all first-person rants given over by the somehow alienated, individuals seeking only a sympathetic hearing, all dealing with identity and religion as well as occupied with technical ideas of reliable narration and the structure of the mind's ear. From a review of a book about the Holocaust that's six-million blank pages to a suicide note from a young university student, from a letter to home outlining an economy based on hair to a eulogy for a poem, from a story narrated by three-hundred concubines to the title story about a group of people who interchange appearances, habits, proclivities and talents, The Quorum is a sensitive and inevitably absurd take on the individual's lifelong quest to get someone, anyone, to listen.
Book Details
- Publisher: Twisted Spoon Press
- Publish Date: Nov 1st, 2005
- Pages: 286
- Language: English
- Edition: undefined - undefined
- Dimensions: 7.88in - 5.60in - 0.49in - 0.59lb
- EAN: 9788086264202
- Categories: • General
About the Author
Cohen, Joshua: - "Joshua Cohen was born in 1980 in New Jersey. He lived in Prague for a number of years, working as a journalist, essayist and editor for many publications, including the Prague Pill, Prague Literary Review, Czech Business Weekly, and Aufbau. His fiction has appeared in many journals -- such as Sleeping Fish, Fiction Warehouse, Zeek -- and anthologies, most recently in Text: UR - The New Book of Masks (Raw Dog Screaming Press, 2007). A recipient of first prize in The Modern Word's 2003 Short Story Contest and short-listed for the Koret Foundation's prestigious 2005 Young Writer on Jewish Themes Award, Cohen now resides in New York, where he is a regular contributor to The Forward. He is the author of A Heaven of Others and Aleph-Bet, An Alphabet for the Perplexed. Cohen was awarded a 2022 Pulitzer Prize for his novel The Netanyahus."
Praise for this book
Cohen writes with a purpose and clarity that belies his youth, but with all the ferocious energy of inexperience ... In this collection, [he] employs the destabilizing irony and complexity of the best innovative writing to reach toward [...] the "perpetual" the idea that some consistent, underlying truth does, or should, exist.
-- The Review of Contemporary Fiction
-- The Review of Contemporary Fiction
The blasphemous Hegelian synthesis Cohen's continually undertaking puts the balm of his irrepressible lyricism on the ancestral wound. It's difficult, as the writer-narrators often admit, not to pile on the prose bandages too thick.
-- Village Voice
-- Village Voice
These are formidable stories indeed--demanding full attention every sentence.
-- Michael Disend author of Stomping the Goyim
-- Michael Disend author of Stomping the Goyim
Cohen is probably the most serious non-Czech writer to come out of Prague in recent years. When he wasn't stirring up trouble at the Prague Pill (RIP), he was stirring up dust at home, in his tiny basement flat in Old Town, working deep into the night like the demented alchemists who came before him. I call him an alchemist because that's what he does in his work--he takes those shitty inevitable bits from the world around him and turns them into golden nuggets of metaphysical brilliance.
-- Think *again
-- Think *again