The Netanyahus

(Paperback)

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Description

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.

'The Netanyahus is constructed with a brilliant comic grace that moves from the sly to the exuberant ... The vision in this book is deeply original, making clear what a superb writer Joshua Cohen is.' - Colm Toibin

'Absorbing, delightful, hilarious, breathtaking and the best and most relevant novel I've read in what feels like forever.' - New York Times Book Review

Reviews

'Joshua Cohen is such an accomplished writer it's surprising he isn't a better known one.... Cohen's new book - his sixth - continues the turn to allegorical realism [and] 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 Cohen's sixth novel, his most conventional and his best to date. It is a tour de force: compact, laugh-out-loud funny, the best new novel I've read this year [and] probably the funniest novel ever written about contending historiographies.... Cohen's lesson, in this determinedly comic novel, is that history happens as farce and tragedy simultaneously.' - John Phipps, The Times

'[Cohen] clearly is a genius ... The Netanyahus [is] a comic historical fantasia - a dizzying range of bookish learning and worldly knowhow is given rich, resourceful expression.... 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.... This is a brisk, impudent, utterly immersive novel.' - Leo Robson, Guardian

'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.... This is a surprising novel, full of quirks and explosive moments' - Christopher Shrimpton, Spectator

'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, author of Forest Dark

Author Bio

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 non-fiction collection Attention: Dispatches from a Land of Distraction. Called 'a major American writer' by the New York Times, 'maybe America's greatest living writer' by the Washington Post, and 'an extraordinary prose stylist, surely one of the most prodigious at work in American fiction today' by the New Yorker, 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.