Center for the literary arts in New York State
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PULITZER PRIZE WINNER IN FICTION
Joshua Cohen
4:30 p.m. Tuesday, November 12, 2024
Conversation / Q&A
University at Albany
Assembly Hall (2nd floor) Campus Center
1400 Washington Avenue Albany NY 12222 - See map.
Joshua Cohen won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for his novel, The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family.
The book presents a fictionalized account of an awkward event in the life of major American literary critic Harold Bloom. An American professor is called upon to play host to medieval historian Benzion Netanyahu and his family, including his son, Benjamin Netanyahu, at an upstate New York college in the late 1950s. With humor and keen insight, the novel dramatizes cultural and intellectual clashes between American and Israeli Jews.
Along with the Pulitzer, The Netanyahus is the winner of the 2021 National Jewish Book Award for Fiction, a finalist for the 2021 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, and one of the 10 Best Books of 2021 (The Wall Street Journal), 100 Notable Books of 2021 (The New York Times), Best Fiction Books of the Year, (Kirkus), 15 Best Books of 2021 (The A.V. Club), 24 Best Fiction Books of 2021 (The Times), Best Fiction Books of 2021 (The Telegraph), and 20 Best Books of theYear (The New Statesman).
Cohen is also a contributor to the bilingual 2023 Hebrew-English anthology, Shelter, October 7th and After, edited by Oded Wolkstein and Maayan Eitan, a soul-searching exploration of the idea of refuge and safety in Jewish history and experience.
from the publisher:
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.
praise:
The Netanyahus is the winner of the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and the 2021 National Jewish Book Award for Fiction, a finalist for the 2021 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, and one of the 10 Best Books of 2021 (The Wall Street Journal), 100 Notable Books of 2021 (The New York Times), Best Fiction Books of the Year, (Kirkus), 15 Best Books of 2021 (The A.V. Club), 24 Best Fiction Books of 2021 (The Times), Best Fiction Books of 2021 (The Telegraph), and 20 Best Books of theYear (The New Statesman).
No one writing in English today is more gifted than Joshua Cohen. Every page of The Netanyahus—an historical account of a man left out of history, a wickedly funny fable of the return of the repressed—crackles with Cohen’s high style and joyride intelligence.
—Nicole Krauss
The Netanyahus is constructed with a brilliant comic grace that moves from the sly to the exuberant. Some scenes are funny beyond belief. But even when moments in the book are sharp or melancholy, they keep an undertone of witty and ironic observation. The vision in this book is deeply original, making clear what a superb writer Joshua Cohen is.
—Colm Tóibín
A domestic sitcom farce, a ferocious academic sendup. And also, in contrast to an entire generation of fastidious timidities (Doctorow, Mailer, et al.), a rousing lecture on Jewish history leading to Zionism. The drive to quarrel with a character is only one of the delights of Cohen’s shrewd, exuberant, exhilarating and merry novel.
—Cynthia Ozick
The Netanyahus is a generational campus novel, an unyielding academic lecture, a rigorous meditation on Jewish identity, an exhaustive meditation on Jewish-American identity, a polemic on Zionism, a history lesson. It is an infuriating, frustrating, pretentious piece of work — and also absorbing, delightful, hilarious, breathtaking and the best and most relevant novel I’ve read in what feels like forever.
—Taffy Brodesser-Akner, The New York Times
The Netanyahus…explores the violence intrinsic to intransigence and purity. With it [Cohen] proves himself not just America’s most perceptive and imaginative Jewish novelist, but one of its best novelists full stop.
—Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal
Riffing freely on a true story, this brilliant and hilarious new book takes a cozily familiar form, the campus novel, and turns it into a slyly oblique fable about history, identity and the conflicted heart of Jewishness, especially in America.
—John Powers, NPR
Joshua Cohen’s The Netanyahus is the funniest, smartest, most exhilarating read of the year.
—Corey Robin, Jacobin
The true trick of The Netanyahus is that it can be read on two levels, romp or polemic, and not at once — it’s a bit of a duck-rabbit, in the end, flipping between the binary of the story of the founding of a nation and the story of the founding of a family. … Taken as a “minor and ultimately even negligible episode” from the archives of a “very famous family,” the novel is a lark; taken as a metafictional study of national identity and hegemony, it does most of what Cohen has always done well — wordplay, polemics, puns, the politics of assimilation, Jewishness, innovation in the novel as form — to harrowing effect.
—Jessi Jezewska Stevens, Foreign Policy