Author
Joshua Cohen
Birth Date
September 6, 1980
(45 Years)
Associated Country
United States
Joshua Cohen is an American novelist known for his intellectually ambitious, formally inventive fiction that often explores history, technology, media, and Jewish identity. Raised in New Jersey, he developed an early interest in literature and later lived in various locations in Europe, including Eastern Europe, which influenced his thematic focus on displacement, memory, and cultural history.
Cohen has written novels, essays, and short fiction that frequently experiment with structure and language. His notable works include Witz, Book of Numbers, and The Netanyahus (2021), a comic historical novel inspired by a real visit from the historian Ben-Zion Netanyahu to an American college campus. The book won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2022.
In addition to fiction, Cohen has written essays and criticism on literature, technology, and contemporary culture. His work is known for its dense, playful prose and its engagement with philosophical and historical questions, establishing him as one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary American literature.
Cohen has written novels, essays, and short fiction that frequently experiment with structure and language. His notable works include Witz, Book of Numbers, and The Netanyahus (2021), a comic historical novel inspired by a real visit from the historian Ben-Zion Netanyahu to an American college campus. The book won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2022.
In addition to fiction, Cohen has written essays and criticism on literature, technology, and contemporary culture. His work is known for its dense, playful prose and its engagement with philosophical and historical questions, establishing him as one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary American literature.
Books
The Netanyahus 2021
Set in a small American college town in the late 1950s, The Netanyahus is narrated by Ruben Blum, a mild-mannered history professor who finds his quiet academic life disrupted when he is assigned to...
Attention 2019
One of Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists, Joshua Cohen arrives with his first collection of nonfiction, the culmination of two decades of writing and thought about life in the digital age. In...
Moving Kings 2018
One of the boldest voices of his generation, Joshua Cohen returns with Moving Kings, a powerful and provocative novel that interweaves, in profoundly intimate terms, the housing crisis in America’s...
Book of Numbers 2016
The enigmatic billionaire founder of Tetration, the world’s most powerful tech company, hires a failed novelist, Josh Cohen, to ghostwrite his memoirs. The mogul, known as Principal, brings Josh...
Four New Messages 2012
A spectacularly talented young writer has returned from the present with Four New Messages, urgent and visionary dispatches that seek to save art, sex, and even alienation from corporatism and...
In this collection of essays, Joshua Cohen locates ideas about democracy in three far-ranging contexts. First, he explores the relationship between democratic values and history. He then discusses...
Witz 2010
By the following Passover, however, only one is still alive: Benjamin Israelien; a kindly, innocent, ignorant man-child. As he finds himself transformed into an international superstar, Jewishness...
The Quorum 2005
Because we shouldn't believe in nations, because we have forsaken our traditions or our traditions have forsaken us, because only individuals matter to those who happen to be one ... because everyone...