Robert Cohen is the author of the novels Amateur Barbarians (2009), Inspired Sleep (2001), The Here and Now (1996), and The Organ Builder (1988), and The Varieties of Romantic Experience (2002), a collection of short stories. His awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers Award, the Ribalow Prize, and the Pushcart Prize, and his short stories and essays have appeared in a number of magazines, including Harper's, GQ, The Paris Review, The Believer, Ploughshares, and others. He has taught at the Iowa Writers Workshop and Harvard University. Currently he teaches at Middlebury College and the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. He lives in Vermont.
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The Here and NowA Novel
“You see, Schmuel,” Aaron resumed, in the tone a very wise man might employ with a very simple child, “the fact is, women’s voices are arousing to men. Don’t you find this to be so?”
“Sure, the good ones. Is that wrong?”
“And when you’re aroused,” he went on, “what happens to your concentration? Out the window. This also is why we separate the genders in shul. Also why our women cover their hair, knees, and shoulders. Why they wear thick stockings, not thin ones. When we pray, we want to immerse ourselves in prayer, not distract ourselves with sex.”
I spoke up then for distracted people everywhere. “What’s so bad about sex?”
The Here and Now:A Novel -
The Here and NowA Novel
“I can’t write it down,” she declared.
“Here, I have a pen.”
“No, no. You don’t understand.” Her hands were bunched into fists. “It’s Shabbos.”
Suddenly this tiny obstacle—my not having a card, and her not being able to write my address down—loomed very large and formidable: a deal-breaker. This Shabbos business, I thought, was getting out of hand. All it did was throw up barricades to normal human behavior. What was so restful about that?
The Here and Now:A Novel -
The Here and NowA Novel
On the cloth sat a bottle of purple Manischewitz wine and a naked baby. The baby, his nap interrupted, looked a bit stupefied. Was this a dream? According to the Talmud (Hal continued), each of us is taught the entire Torah in utero, but in our journey down the birth canal an angel taps us on the lips—an impression we retain forever—and makes us forget it all. Thus we begin life already betrayed by education, with only a blank slate upon which to record our blunders in the world.
Not that this was the baby’s only predicament. Here, leaning over him, was an old man with a knife. And here at his feet was another old man, his alleged grandfather, prying apart his ankles. What kind of vengeful conspiracy was this?
The Here and Now:A Novel
“Formidable. . . . Cohen balances . . . robust black comedy with moments of quietly profound feeling.” —The Atlantic Monthly [on The Varieties of Romantic Experience]
“With the perfect pitch of Chekhov satire . . . Cohen can extend a series of metaphors like taffy.” —The New York Times Book Review [on The Varieties of Romantic Experience]
“Smartly observed and stylishly written. . . It’s not the interpretation of dreams but the meaning of our waking hours that is up for grabs here.” —The New Yorker [on Inspired Sleep]
“A sparkling comic novel of postmodern pathologies. . . . Crisp and scathingly intelligent.” —Chicago Tribune [on Inspired Sleep]
Selected Works
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