Joshua Cohen

By Joshua Cohen

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  Culture

  Language Arts, or Lack Thereof

  Detective Story By Imre Kertész Translated from the Hungarian by Tim Wilkinson Knopf, 112 pages, $21. The Pathseeker By Imre Kertész Translated from the Hungarian by Tim Wilkinson Melville House, 130 pages, $13. Born in 1929 in Budapest, Imre Kertész completed his education at the universities of Auschwitz and Buchenwald before working as a journalist…

  By Joshua Cohen Apr 16, 2008 | 7 min read
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  Culture

  Agnon’s Recurring Nightmare

  To This Day S.Y. Agnon Translated from the Hebrew, and with an introduction, by Hillel Halkin The Toby Press, 188 pages, $24.95. Reader, I would like to offer a brief and abridged history of Recurrence in the arts. I want to make this survey — progressing from the Romantic rewriting of folklore through Existentialism, to…

  By Joshua Cohen Apr 10, 2008 | 5 min read
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  Culture

  The Eye, And I, of the Ethnographer

  Ashantee By Peter Altenberg Translated by Katharina von Hammerstein Ariadne Press, 128 pages, $15. In 1896, a group of people from the Ashanti tribe was displayed in an ethnographic exhibit in Vienna’s Prater, huts erected amid its Tiergarten, or zoo. There, to the delight of 5,000 to 6,000 visitors a day, they sang, danced the…

  By Joshua Cohen Mar 20, 2008 | 5 min read
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  Culture

  In the Beginning, There Was Vitebsk

  Vitebsk: The Life of Art By Aleksandra Shatskikh, translated by Katherine Foshko Tsan Yale University Press, 408 pages, $55. In the beginning, otherwise known as the year 988, Rus converted to Christianity, Vitebsk was founded and 1,000 years later, the Soviet Union collapsed, which was good. Today a backwater of fascist Belarus, Vitebsk had always…

  By Joshua Cohen Mar 13, 2008 | 7 min read
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  Culture

  A Shiva on Every Page

  Lush Life By Richard Price Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 464 pages, $26. Bodymore, Murderland: Two white cops encounter a black drug dealer on a blighted street corner; one of them asks where he could get a baseball cap like that, with a brim to the side. The dealer answers that his is just a regular…

  By Joshua Cohen Feb 28, 2008 | 4 min read
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  Culture

  Aleksander Skidan Sees ‘Red’

  Aleksander Skidan has a talent that, like his nose, is poetically bent — left of center, pensively down-turned and seriously humorous. A poet and essayist by nature, and a translator by necessity, he is one of the foremost Russian writers of his turbulent generation. He was born in Leningrad in 1965 and lives in the…

  By Joshua Cohen Feb 6, 2008 | 5 min read
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  Culture

  The Mistress of Mistrust: Reading Nadine Gordimer’s New Collection

  Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black: And Other Stories By Nadine Gordimer Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 192 pages, $21. ‘Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black: And Other Stories” is the 11th collection of stories by Nadine Gordimer, and though it is not her best, it is better by leaps, bounds and all African distance than the work of most…

  By Joshua Cohen Jan 30, 2008 | 4 min read
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  Culture

  A Dictionary of Criminous Thought: Roberto Bolaño’s Compendium of Nazi Collaborationist Writing

  Nazi Literature in the Americas By Roberto Bolaño Translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews New Directions, 280 pages, $23.95. Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003) was a Trotskyite, drug addict, vagabond and expatriate. He wanted to be what capitalism might call “an experimental poet,” but instead became Chile’s greatest novelist. Bolaño seems to have summarized his own…

  By Joshua Cohen Jan 8, 2008 | 5 min read