Bücher von Marvin Cohen

Poetry. In this prodigious outpouring of short pieces, Marvin Cohen looks into every corner of human affairs, even the darkest - death, reproduction, evolution, friendship, grief, the vagaries of adaptation and survival - with a joyful spark that never goes out.

Fiction. 2018 Foreword INDIES Finalist for Literary Adult Fiction. Al Lehman is a bourgeois Everyman, whose true nature is mysterious, radically unformed, incomplete, and frustrated, even as the quotidian circumstances of his life are drearily grounded in a fixed temporal reality. In this episodic novel, comic and philosophical, written in the late 70s in Cohen's highly idiosyncratic and extraordinarily poetic language, different aspects of Lehman's quest to exist in the scope of finitude, in the belly of a universe that does not fully nourish him, but is the source of all nourishment, are brilliantly distilled. INSIDE THE WORLD: AS AL LEHMAN is a companion novel to WOMEN, AND TOM GERVASI, whose central figure could be Lehman's wish-fulfilling dream projection: a Don Juan who exists in a world of limitless physical and emotional gratification. Taken together, the two novels comprise a kind of comedic Either/Or in which are explored a wide range of the merits and dismerits of the real and ideal.

Fiction. Every possible life--charmed, doomed, or both--of a Don Juan of 1970s New York, is captured, in its every conceivable inflection, in Marvin Cohen's comic episodic novel WOMEN, AND TOM GERVASI. The philanderer at the heart of the novel is hopelessly, effortlessly, universally, even fatally attractive to women. His oversized invulnerability is both monstrous and very recognizably human. Gervasi is a kind of necessary mythic extrapolation of the ego, an imaginary counterweight to the reality of self-loss, a King Midas whose limitless power is his own undoing, and who is ultimately shown, through Cohen's Cubist technique of exhaustively presenting every perspective on his character, to exist in a kind of Hell of spiritual isolation and inability to love. As always, Cohen writes with a vigorous wit; his poetic dialect reforges the English language into utterly original, surprising and delightful forms. Written in the late 70s and never before published, this novel is one of a pair with INSIDE THE WORLD: AS AL LEHMAN (published simultaneously), Cohen's novel about a non-Don Juan.