Corbin College, not-quite-upstate New York, winter 1959-1960: Ruben Blum, a Jewish historian – but not an historian of the Jews - is coopted 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 non-fiction, the campus novel with the lecture, The Netanyahus is a wildly inventive, genre-bending comedy of blending, identity, and politics – 'An Account of A Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family' that finds Joshua Cohen at the height of his powers.
‘Joshua Cohen is such an accomplished writer it’s surprising he isn’t a better known one. ... Cohen’s new book – his sixth – continues the turn to allegorical realism [and] is among his best: a fastidious and very funny book that is one of the most purely pleasurable works of fiction I’ve read in ages.’
- Jon Day, Financial Times
‘The Netanyahus is Cohen’s sixth novel, his most conventional and his best to date. It is a tour de force: compact, laugh-out-loud funny, the best new novel I’ve read this year [and] probably the funniest novel ever written about contending historiographies. ... Cohen’s lesson, in this determinedly comic novel, is that history happens as farce and tragedy simultaneously.’
- John Phipps, The Times
‘No one writing in English today is more gifted than Joshua Cohen. Every page of The Netanyahus – an historical account of a man left out of history, a wickedly funny fable of the return of the repressed – crackles with Cohen’s high style and joyride intelligence.’
- Nicole Krauss, author of Forest Dark
‘The Netanyahus is constructed with a brilliant comic grace that moves from the sly to the exuberant. Some scenes are funny beyond belief. But even when moments in the book are sharp or melancholy, they keep an undertone of witty and ironic observation. The vision in this book is deeply original, making clear what a superb writer Joshua Cohen is.’
- Colm Tóibín, author of The Magician
‘Cohen is an extraordinary prose stylist, surely one of the most prodigious in American fiction today.’
-James Wood, New Yorker
Joshua Cohen was born in 1980 in Atlantic City. His books include the novels Moving Kings, Book of Numbers, Witz, A Heaven of Others, and Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto; the short fiction collection Four New Messages, and the nonfiction collection Attention: Dispatches from a Land of Distraction. Called ‘a major American writer’ by the New York Times, ‘maybe America’s greatest living writer’ by the Washington Post, and ‘an extraordinary prose stylist, surely one of the most prodigious at work in American fiction today’ by the New Yorker, Cohen was named one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists in 2013. He lives in New York City.
Corbin College, not-quite-upstate New York, winter 1959-1960: Ruben Blum, a Jewish historian – but not an historian of the Jews - is coopted 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 non-fiction, the campus novel with the lecture, The Netanyahus is a wildly inventive, genre-bending comedy of blending, identity, and politics – 'An Account of A Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family' that finds Joshua Cohen at the height of his powers.
‘Joshua Cohen is such an accomplished writer it’s surprising he isn’t a better known one. ... Cohen’s new book – his sixth – continues the turn to allegorical realism [and] is among his best: a fastidious and very funny book that is one of the most purely pleasurable works of fiction I’ve read in ages.’
- Jon Day, Financial Times
‘The Netanyahus is Cohen’s sixth novel, his most conventional and his best to date. It is a tour de force: compact, laugh-out-loud funny, the best new novel I’ve read this year [and] probably the funniest novel ever written about contending historiographies. ... Cohen’s lesson, in this determinedly comic novel, is that history happens as farce and tragedy simultaneously.’
- John Phipps, The Times
‘No one writing in English today is more gifted than Joshua Cohen. Every page of The Netanyahus – an historical account of a man left out of history, a wickedly funny fable of the return of the repressed – crackles with Cohen’s high style and joyride intelligence.’
- Nicole Krauss, author of Forest Dark
‘The Netanyahus is constructed with a brilliant comic grace that moves from the sly to the exuberant. Some scenes are funny beyond belief. But even when moments in the book are sharp or melancholy, they keep an undertone of witty and ironic observation. The vision in this book is deeply original, making clear what a superb writer Joshua Cohen is.’
- Colm Tóibín, author of The Magician
‘Cohen is an extraordinary prose stylist, surely one of the most prodigious in American fiction today.’
-James Wood, New Yorker
Joshua Cohen was born in 1980 in Atlantic City. His books include the novels Moving Kings, Book of Numbers, Witz, A Heaven of Others, and Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto; the short fiction collection Four New Messages, and the nonfiction collection Attention: Dispatches from a Land of Distraction. Called ‘a major American writer’ by the New York Times, ‘maybe America’s greatest living writer’ by the Washington Post, and ‘an extraordinary prose stylist, surely one of the most prodigious at work in American fiction today’ by the New Yorker, Cohen was named one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists in 2013. He lives in New York City.
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