Joshua Cohen
THE NETANYAHUS: AN ACCOUNT OF A MINOR AND ULTIMATELY EVEN NEGLIGIBLE EPISODE IN THE HISTORY OF A VERY FAMOUS FAMILY
ABOUT THE BOOK
Corbin College, not-quite-upstate New York, winter 1959-1960: Ruben Blum, a Jewish historian--but not an historian of the Jews--is co-opted 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.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
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. In 2022, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for "The Netanyahus" . He lives in New York City.
