The Netanyahus : A Reading and Talk with Joshua Cohen
Wednesday, January 19, 2022 at 19:30
10, rue du Général Camou, 75007 Paris
Please RSVP for in-person attendance (limited) or to obtain the Zoom link here.
AUP’s Center for Writers and Translators is delighted to present a conversation with Joshua Cohen about The Netanyahus in collaboration with the Center for Critical Democracy Studies and the American Library in Paris.
Set at Corbin College in a fictional, sleepy college town in upstate New York over the winter of 1959 to 1960, The Netanyahus follows Ruben Blum, a Jewish historian, as he reviews the job application of an exiled Israeli scholar whose speciality is the Spanish Inquisition. When Benzion Netanyahu, a Polish-born, Israel-based academic better known as Benjamin’s father, shows up for an interview, Blum plays the reluctant chaperone to guests who proceed to lay waste to his American complacencies.
Subtitled An Account of A Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family, and described as “the best and most relevant novel I’ve read in what feels like forever” by Taffy Brodesser-Akner for the The New York Times, Cohen’s new novel mixes fiction with nonfiction, the campus novel with the lecture. The final product is a wildly inventive, genre-bending comedy of blending, identity, and politics that finds Cohen at the height of his powers.
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 non-fiction 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 awarded Israel’s 2013 Matanel Prize for Jewish Writers, and in 2017 was named one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists. He lives in New York City.