The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family
Joshua Cohen
(Author)
Description
WINNER OF THE 2022 PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION 2021 NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD WINNER A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2021 A WALL STREET JOURNAL BEST BOOK OF 2021 A KIRKUS BEST FICTION BOOK OF 2021 "Absorbing, delightful, hilarious, breathtaking and the best and most relevant novel I've read in what feels like forever." --Taffy Brodesser-Akner, The New York Times Book Review Corbin College, not quite upstate New York, winter 1959-1960: Ruben Blum, a Jewish historian--but not an historian of the Jews--is co-opted onto a hiring committee to review the application of an exiled Israeli scholar specializing in the Spanish Inquisition. When Benzion Netanyahu shows up for an interview, family unexpectedly in tow, Blum plays the reluctant host to guests who proceed to lay waste to his American complacencies. Mixing fiction with nonfiction, the campus novel with the lecture, The Netanyahus is a wildly inventive, genre-bending comedy of blending, identity, and politics that finds Joshua Cohen at the height of his powers.
Product Details
Price
$16.95
$15.76
Publisher
New York Review of Books
Publish Date
June 22, 2021
Pages
248
Dimensions
5.7 X 8.4 X 0.9 inches | 0.7 pounds
Language
English
Type
Paperback
EAN/UPC
9781681376073
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About the Author
Joshua Cohen was born in 1980 in Atlantic City. His books include the novels 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.
Reviews
"No one writing in English today is more gifted than Joshua Cohen. Every page of The Netanyahus--an historical account of a man left out of history, a wickedly funny fable of the return of the repressed--crackles with Cohen's high style and joyride intelligence." --Nicole Krauss "The Netanyahus is constructed with a brilliant comic grace that moves from the sly to the exuberant. Some scenes are funny beyond belief. But even when moments in the book are sharp or melancholy, they keep an undertone of witty and ironic observation. The vision in this book is deeply original, making clear what a superb writer Joshua Cohen is." --Colm Tóibín "A domestic sitcom farce, a ferocious academic sendup. And also, in contrast to an entire generation of fastidious timidities (Doctorow, Mailer, et al.), a rousing lecture on Jewish history leading to Zionism. . . . The drive to quarrel with a character is only one of the delights of Cohen's shrewd, exuberant, exhilarating and merry novel." --Cynthia Ozick "Cohen is an extraordinary prose stylist, surely one of the most prodigious in American fiction today. . . . A crystalline novelist with a journalistic openness to the world." --James Wood, The New Yorker "Cohen's writing is vibrant even when ruminating on esoteric details on Jewish identity theories. . . . This blistering portrait is great fun." --Publishers Weekly "Cohen's new book is among his best: a fastidious and very funny book that is one of the most purely pleasurable works of fiction I've read in ages." --Jon Day, Financial Times
"The Netanyahus. . . is a campus novel that is also a novel of ideas--a conjunction less common than one might expect. Luckily it's also very, very funny." --Len Gutkin, The Chronicle of Higher Education "Clever, funny, dark, deeply moving, full of references to everyone from Nabokov and the Marx Brothers to Jabotinsky and the late Harold Bloom, The Netanyahus is a joy to read." --David Herman, The Jewish Chronicle
"The Netanyahus, like Cohen's previous novels, is driven by the momentum of its prose. It has a freewheeling, all-consuming style which frequently turns up unexpected delights. There are nicely odd verbs: 'A car came chunking down Evergreen'; Ruben's father-in-law 'bellied onto the carpet-runner' to examine a faulty socket. . . . This is a surprising novel, full of quirks and explosive moments, and, all in all, Dr Netanyahu proves a welcome guest." --Christopher Shrimpton, The Spectator
"The first obligation, when turning to the work of the electrifying American writer Joshua Cohen, is to stress that he clearly is a genius. . . . With its tight time frame, loopy narrator, portrait of Jewish-American life against a semi-rural backdrop, and moments of cruel academic satire, The Netanyahus reads like an attempt, as delightful as it sounds, to cross-breed Roth's The Ghost Writer and Nabokov's Pale Fire." --Leo Robson, The Guardian "Whoever bet Josh Cohen he couldn't write a convincing and thoroughly entertaining midcentury campus novel, somewhere between Saul Bellow and Kingsley Amis--with a vulgar streak of Roth for good measure--deserves his bar tab picked up for a night. . . Cohen somehow renders the hypocritical banalities of midcentury American faculty politics in a way that feels very 21st century, without once using the word 'cancel'. . . . [The Netanyahus] is torrentially satisfying." --Jonny Diamond, Lit Hub
"The Netanyahus. . . is a campus novel that is also a novel of ideas--a conjunction less common than one might expect. Luckily it's also very, very funny." --Len Gutkin, The Chronicle of Higher Education "Clever, funny, dark, deeply moving, full of references to everyone from Nabokov and the Marx Brothers to Jabotinsky and the late Harold Bloom, The Netanyahus is a joy to read." --David Herman, The Jewish Chronicle
"The Netanyahus, like Cohen's previous novels, is driven by the momentum of its prose. It has a freewheeling, all-consuming style which frequently turns up unexpected delights. There are nicely odd verbs: 'A car came chunking down Evergreen'; Ruben's father-in-law 'bellied onto the carpet-runner' to examine a faulty socket. . . . This is a surprising novel, full of quirks and explosive moments, and, all in all, Dr Netanyahu proves a welcome guest." --Christopher Shrimpton, The Spectator
"The first obligation, when turning to the work of the electrifying American writer Joshua Cohen, is to stress that he clearly is a genius. . . . With its tight time frame, loopy narrator, portrait of Jewish-American life against a semi-rural backdrop, and moments of cruel academic satire, The Netanyahus reads like an attempt, as delightful as it sounds, to cross-breed Roth's The Ghost Writer and Nabokov's Pale Fire." --Leo Robson, The Guardian "Whoever bet Josh Cohen he couldn't write a convincing and thoroughly entertaining midcentury campus novel, somewhere between Saul Bellow and Kingsley Amis--with a vulgar streak of Roth for good measure--deserves his bar tab picked up for a night. . . Cohen somehow renders the hypocritical banalities of midcentury American faculty politics in a way that feels very 21st century, without once using the word 'cancel'. . . . [The Netanyahus] is torrentially satisfying." --Jonny Diamond, Lit Hub
