Moving Kings

(Paperback)

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One of the boldest voices of his generation, Joshua Cohen returns with Moving Kings, a propulsive, incendiary novel that interweaves, in profoundly intimate terms, the housing crisis in America's poor black and Hispanic neighborhoods with the world's oldest conflict, in the Middle East.

The year is 2015, and twenty-one-year-olds Yoav and Uri, veterans of the last Gaza War, have just completed their compulsory military service in the Israel Defense Forces. In keeping with national tradition, they take a year off for rest, recovery, and travel. They come to New York City and begin working for Yoav's distant cousin David King - a proud American patriot, Republican, and Jew, and the recently divorced proprietor of King's Moving Inc., a heavyweight in the Tri-State area's moving and storage industries. What starts off as a profitable if eerily familiar job - an "Occupation" - quickly turns violent when they encounter one homeowner seeking revenge.

Driven by Cohen's characteristic intelligence, boundless energy, psychological tension, and humor, Moving Kings is a powerful and provocative novel about faith, race, class, and what it means to have a home.

'Funny, smart, and perfectly addictive, Moving Kings is a novel of wonderful scope. It shows Cohen at the top of his powers and is bound to bring him many new readers, hot for a fresh understanding of America.' - Andrew O'Hagan, author of Mayflies

Reviews

'A Jewish Sopranos [...] burly with particularities and vibrant with voice [...] utterly engrossing, full of passionate sympathy [...] This is a book of brilliant sentences, brilliant paragraphs, brilliant chapters [...] There's not a page without some vital charge - a flash of metaphor, an idiomatic originality, a bastard neologism born of nothing [...] Cohen is an extraordinary prose stylist, surely one of the most prodigious in American fiction today [...] his sentences are all-season journeyers, able to do everything everywhere at once [...] A crystalline novelist with a journalistic openness to the world.' - James Wood, New Yorker

'Joshua Cohen's Moving Kings is a lit fuse, a force let loose, a creeping flame heading for demolition, and Cohen himself is a fierce polyknower in command of the workings of the moving parts of much of the human predicament. A master of argot and wit, he writes the language of men in a staccato yet keening idiom of his own invention. And though it is set in a grungy New York, call this the first Israeli combat novel ever dared by an American writer.' - Cynthia Ozick, author of Foreign Bodies

'Joshua Cohen is a blacksmith who heats, hammers and molds the language to sharpest, most precise points. Not for the sake of craft, but to tell a troubled story about troubled life in the twenty-first century. This is a dazzling and poignant book.' - Rachel Kushner, author of The Flamethrowers

Author Bio

Joshua Cohen was born in 1980 in Atlantic City. He has written novels (Moving Kings, Book of Numbers), short fiction (Four New Messages), and nonfiction for The New York Times, Harper's Magazine, n+1, London Review of Books, The New Republic, and others. From 2001 to 2007, he worked as a journalist throughout Europe. In 2017 he was named one of Granta's Best of Young American Novelists. He lives in New York City.