Robert Cohen

2000 Winner in
Fiction

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.

Reviews & Praise

“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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