Joshua Cohen was born in 1980 in Atlantic City. His books include the novels The Netanyahus, winner of the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, Moving Kings, Book of Numbers, Witz, A Heaven of Others, and Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto; the short-fiction collection Four New Messages, and the nonfiction collection Attention: Dispatches from a Land of Distraction. Cohen was awarded Israel’s 2013 Matanel Prize for Jewish Writers, and in 2017 was named one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists. He lives in New York City.
“Dazzling in its scope . . . If curiosity is a writer’s greatest
innate gift, Joshua Cohen may be America’s greatest living
writer.”—The Washington Post
“Cause for celebration and close study . . . [Cohen] will hunt
after neglected shards of the past, minor histories, and charge
them with an immediacy in the present. . . . He is experimenting
with the essay form much more, and more cleverly, than any major
American writer today.”—The Wall Street Journal
“In Attention, Joshua Cohen makes an eclectic argument for how to
improve our lives. . . . [He] tackles a surprising range of
subjects to underline distraction’s role in our fraught predicament
and to argue that paying attention could help us get out of it. . .
. When it comes to making sense of our times with verve and
imagination, few authors are more rewarding.”—Financial Times
“Brilliant . . . Joshua Cohen—novelist, journalist, critic;
prodigy, polyglot, polymath—has one of the most interesting minds
in circulation. . . . Cohen is working his way through, and laying
claim to, a personal imaginative geography.”—The New York
Times Book Review
“Fabulous . . . funny . . . spot-on . . . There’s so much pleasure
in Cohen’s sentences. . . . What thrilled me was the
imaginative and transfiguring attention Cohen pays to everything he
touches.”—James Wood, The New Yorker
“Prescient . . . Attention reveals a fresh, vital literary voice as
it covers seemingly every imaginable topic relating to modern life,
both at home and abroad.”—Entertainment Weekly
“Whip-sharp . . . Cohen here flaunts a next-level virtuosity across
countless fields of expertise. . . . [He] is a phenomenal thinker
whatever the theme whatever the subject: granular, acrobatic,
startling.”—The Guardian
“Brilliant . . . Cohen’s answer is that the defense of
literature and the defense of the human capacity to pay attention
are inextricably linked. . . . In his novels and here in his first
collection of nonfiction, he seems to be trying to turn the tables,
to insist, with embattled conviction, that the best way to
understand a society that exists and discourses in the cloud is
through the lens of the hardcover tradition of trying to read, or
write, a book. It’s a moving argument, one worth readers’
attention, which is about the highest praise a reviewer can give in
a world that lacks just that.”—Los Angeles Review of Books
“A grand gathering across place and time, cohered around this
notion of attention—who pays it, what it costs . . . [Cohen is] a
dogged and astute chronicler and critic of the internet and the
culture of distraction it engenders. But Attention also pays
attention, a journalist’s or even a muckraker’s attention, to the
real world. To the depredations of post-crash politics and
economics, the resurrection of irony and the death of
facts.”—Bookforum
“Joshua Cohen has a complex and capacious consciousness.”—Harold
Bloom
“Cohen, one of our crucial young novelists, has written the
nonfiction novel of our moment, formed of a constellation of
investigations and inklings. No one’s done such a thing so well
since George Trow or Joan Didion or Norman Mailer, if ever. It’s
chasteningly brilliant, and the kind of chastening we unfortunately
need.”—Jonathan Lethem
“Joshua Cohen is one of my favorite nonfiction writers. This book
is a cause for celebration.”—Elif Batuman
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