Disillusioned with his life and troubled by a mysterious past, corporate lawyer Hesh Freeman agrees to help two filmmakers with their project about his long-lost father, who helped build the A-bomb.
Watching his career and marriage disintegrate, Samuel Karnish meets a Hasidic couple from Brooklyn and begins an unlikely friendship with them, an event that leaves him morally confused and doubting his own faith.
These days, Bonnie Saks is lucky to get four consecutive hours of shut-eye, what with her bed-wetting young son, her unfinished doctoral thesis, her meager teaching salary, and the fact that she’s pregnant by a lover about as reliable as her ex-husband. Meanwhile, Ian Ogelvie, an ambitious young research scientist, is setting up a study of a promising new sleep aid. Their chance encounter forms the backdrop for this richly exuberant portrait of contemporary America, encompassing everything from the slippery evasions of love to the intricate network that binds together the pharmaceutical industry, managed care, and a shadow population of lost, sleepless souls. At once entertaining and philosophic, Inspired Sleep heralds a major voice in American fiction.
In the title story of this dazzling comic collection, a psychology professor delivers a lecture that segues into a confession of an embarrassing affair. An elderly man worried that his life is going downhill heads to an Indian casino in hopes of some relief. A recently divorced man arrives half an hour late to a bachelor party to find that the frightened groom has sent everyone else home. A reclusive writer visits a small college at the invitation of a former student, and nothing goes right. Funny and generous, these stories are virtuoso performances–moving forays into disconcertingly familiar territory that line the often slippery boundaries between masculinity and humanity in American life.
Acclaimed, award-winning novelist Robert Cohen delivers a bold, provocative exploration of the panic of midlife, follow- ing two men plateaued on either side of their forties and the unexpected consequences of changing course. Teddy Hastings is a New England middle school principal desperate for transcendence. Unmoored by his brother's death and a health scare of his own, he tries to broaden his ordinary life and winds up unemployed and on the wrong side of the law. Meanwhile, Oren Pierce, a perpetual grad student from New York, abandons, somewhat to his own surprise, his search for the extraordinary and begins settling into the humble existence that Teddy seeks to escape. What comforts Oren alarms Teddy, and their paths overlap as Teddy's quest for the unknown and unfamiliar experience takes him on a rash trip to Africa, leaving Oren to assume the trappings of his life, including Teddy's wife Gail.
Amateur Barbarians showcases a writer at the peak of his powers, tracing domestic ambivalence, the comic perils of introspection and desire, and the terror of an unlived life with Cohen's signature wit and uncanny perception, proving yet again why he was touted by The New York Times Book Review as the "heir to Saul Bellow and Philip Roth."
In 1924, hoping to cure his illness, Franz Kafka traveled to a sanatorium in Kierling, Austria, run by a Dr. Hugo Hoffman. He would spend his last days there. In Robert Cohen’s story, we see the end of Kafka’s life through Dr. Hoffman’s eyes. The doctor attempts to decipher the dying man’s enigmatic communications, scribbled on scraps of paper, while being harried by Kafka’s friend, Klopstock, and a young woman who has fallen in love with the then-unknown writer. As the case progresses, the once practical and upstanding doctor gets pulled deeper and deeper into his strange patient's world.
