‘Joshua Cohen has a complex and capacious consciousness.’
- Harold Bloom

‘Cohen, one of our crucial young novelists, has made the non-fiction novel of our moment, formed of a constellation of investigations and inklings. No one’s done such a thing so well since George Trow or Joan Didion or Norman Mailer, if ever. It’s chasteningly brilliant, and the kind of chastening we unfortunately need.’
- Jonathan Lethem, author of The Fortress of Solitude

‘Joshua Cohen is one of my favorite nonfiction writers. This book is a cause for celebration.’
- Elif Batuman, author of The Idiot

‘First-rate … Whip-sharp … Cohen here flaunts a next-level virtuosity across countless fields of expertise … [and] tackles the meta-problem of attention with the fervour of a man who knows the solution.... [He] is a phenomenal thinker whatever the theme: granular, acrobatic, startling.’
- Benjamin Evans, the Guardian

‘... cause for celebration and close study. [Cohen] is experimenting with the essay form much more, and more cleverly, than any major American writer today.’
- Zachary Fine, the Wall Street Journal

‘I enjoy his electric prose style … when it comes to making sense of our times with verve and imagination, few authors are more rewarding of our attention.’
- Max Liu, the Financial Times

‘Joshua Cohen – novelist, journalist, critic; prodigy, polyglot, polymath – has one of the most interesting minds in circulation. ... a young elegist for an old idea: ideas. He is a man profoundly out of step with the world in which he finds himself. Which is the only respectable place for a writer to be.’
- New York Times

‘[W]hat thrilled me was the imaginative and transfiguring attention Cohen pays to everything he touches.... There’s so much pleasure in Cohen’s sentences.’
- James Wood, New Yorker

Joshua Cohen was born in 1980 in Atlantic City. He has written novels (Moving Kings, Book of Numbers), short fiction (Four New Messages), and nonfiction for The New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, n+1, London Review of Books, The New Republic, and others. From 2001 to 2007, he worked as a journalist throughout Europe. In 2017 he was named one of Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists. He lives in New York City.