Saturday, May 3, 2008
FREE
Panel discussion "Is Political Fiction Possible"
@ Rust Belt Books
Sat., May 3 @ 2:00 p.m.
w/ Prof. Mark Schechner,Starcherone Books Director Ted
Pelton, &Joshua Cohen
After a 10 year-old Jewish boy is exploded by a 10 year-old Palestinian
boy, he ascends to a heaven his tradition has not prepared him for, a heaven
of others. In a novel suffused with linguistic play, we find both the evocation
of a world left behind and the strangeness of the non-world he has entered.
At once a political novel and one that performs an overture of peace, A
HEAVEN OF OTHERS is also a meditation on that most conflicted of modern
and ancient cities, Jerusalem.
"Cohen's work here is brave, but perhaps more notable for its lack of judgment
on today's world. Though [the protagonist] Jonathan spends much of the story
reflecting on his life on Earth, especially in remembering an obviously
idolized father, the afterlife that Jonathan encounters is peppered with
dangers that are amorphous and beyond anything to do with the living, including
religious beliefs.... Cohen draws attention away from religion and towards
the diffusion of identity that follows from being integrally united with
the totality of Creation. We realize through Jonathan that everything we
are that makes us individual will be lost, and in chilling final lines,
Cohen pinpoints that experience as being one of abject terror ... A
Heaven of Others is a contemplation of life's trivialities in the face
of the unknown of death, and also an affirmation of the importance of those
trivialities in making us who we are as individuals—something that
doesn't last for very long." - Pop Matters
Joshua Cohen is the author of three previous books, The Quorum,
Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto, and Aleph-Bet:
An Alphabet for the Perplexed (illustrated, like A Heaven of Others,
by Michael Hafftka). He was born in southern New Jersey in 1980. He is a
book critic for The Forward and lives in Brooklyn, NY.
Some publications related to this event:
May, 2008 - 2008