Keynote
A quartet of audacious fictions that capture the pathos and absurdity of life in the age of the internet
Book Title
Four New Messages
Cover Image
- “These [stories] were a revelation. . . . Intelligent, lyrical, prosaic, theoretical, pragmatic, funny, serious. [Cohen’s] best prose does everything at once.”—James Wood, The New Yorker
Body
A spectacularly talented young writer has returned from the present with Four New Messages, urgent and visionary dispatches that seek to save art, sex, and even alienation from corporatism and technology run rampant.
In "Emission," a hapless drug dealer in Princeton is humiliated when a cruel co-ed exposes him exposing himself on a blog gone viral. "McDonald's" tells of a frustrated pharmaceutical copywriter whose imaginative flights fail to bring solace because of a certain word he cannot put down on paper. In "The College Borough" a father visiting NYU with his daughter remembers a former writing teacher, a New Yorker exiled to the Midwest who refuses to read his students' stories, asking them instead to build a replica of the Flatiron Building. "Sent" begins mythically in the woods of Russia, but in a few virtuosic pages plunges into the present, where an aspiring journalist finds himself in a village that shelters all the women who've starred in all the internet porn he's ever enjoyed.
Highbrow and low-down, these four intensely felt stories explain what happens when the virtual begins to colonize the real—they harness the torrential power and verbal dexterity that have established Cohen as one of America's most brilliant younger writers.
In "Emission," a hapless drug dealer in Princeton is humiliated when a cruel co-ed exposes him exposing himself on a blog gone viral. "McDonald's" tells of a frustrated pharmaceutical copywriter whose imaginative flights fail to bring solace because of a certain word he cannot put down on paper. In "The College Borough" a father visiting NYU with his daughter remembers a former writing teacher, a New Yorker exiled to the Midwest who refuses to read his students' stories, asking them instead to build a replica of the Flatiron Building. "Sent" begins mythically in the woods of Russia, but in a few virtuosic pages plunges into the present, where an aspiring journalist finds himself in a village that shelters all the women who've starred in all the internet porn he's ever enjoyed.
Highbrow and low-down, these four intensely felt stories explain what happens when the virtual begins to colonize the real—they harness the torrential power and verbal dexterity that have established Cohen as one of America's most brilliant younger writers.
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About the Author
Credit: Esfir De Veeck
Praise
- Finalist for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Literary Award
- “Mr. Cohen’s stories are about a lot of things: sex, family, disappointment, literary frustration. . . . What’s a book but a public offering? You’ll want to be in on the ground floor.”—Dwight Garner, The New York Times
- “Language—not elision—is the primary material of Cohen’s oeuvre. . . . The reward is an off-kilter precision, one that feels both untainted and unique.”—Rachel Kushner, The New York Times Book Review
- “In Mr. Cohen’s hands, a meme is a matter of life and death, because he goes from the reality we all know—the link, the click—to the one we tend to forget: the human.”—The New York Observer
