Witz

Häftad, Engelska, 2025

379 kr

Kommande

From the author of the 2022 Pulitzer winner The Netanyahus, one of the great comic epics of our time: the Last Jewish Novel about the Last Jew in the World.On Christmas Eve 1999, all the Jews in the world die in a strange, millennial plague, with the exception of the firstborn males, who are soon adopted by a cabal of powerful people in the American government. By the following Passover, however, only one is still alive: Benjamin Israelien, a kindly, innocent, ignorant man-child. As he finds himself transformed into an international superstar, Jewishness becomes all the rage: matzo-ball soup is in every bowl, sidelocks are hip, and the only truly Jewish Jew left is increasingly stigmatized for not being religious. Since his very existence exposes the illegitimacy of the newly converted, Israelien becomes the object of a worldwide hunt…Meanwhile, in the not-too-distant future of our own, “real” world, another last Jew—the last living Holocaust survivor—sits alone in a snowbound Manhattan, providing a final melancholy witness to his experiences in the form of the punch lines to half-remembered jokes.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum2025-10-09
Mått139 x 215 x undefined mm
FormatHäftad
SpråkEngelska
Antal sidor850
FörlagDalkey Archive Press
ISBN9781628975673

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Joshua Cohen was born in 1980 in Atlantic City. Called "a major American writer" by the New York Times and "an extraordinary prose stylist, surely one of the most prodigious at work in American fiction today" by the New Yorker, Cohen has published novels (The Netanyahus, Moving Kings, Book of Numbers, Witz), a collection of stories (Four New Messages), and a collection of essays (Attention). He was named one of Granta's Best Young American Novelists, and his awards include the Matanel Prize, the National Jewish Book Award, and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

"The sort of postmodern epic that arrives like a comet about once every decade, like Infinite Jest or Gravity's Rainbow. Like any epic, it defies summary and overflows with puns, allusions, digressions, authorial sleights of hand and structural gags—in the tradition of Thomas Pynchon, James Joyce, Jonathan Swift and Laurence Sterne." —Christian Lorentzen, New York Observer “Witz is a brave and artful attempt to explore and explode the limits of the sentence." —New York Times "In this ambitious novel, Benjamin Israelien—born full grown, bearded, and wearing glasses—is the last living Jew, a national celebrity and Messiah-like great hope for an America terrified of losing God’s grace. In more than eight hundred pages of dense, often self-amused prose, he tours in a big revival show, visits Holocaust sites ('Whateverwitz' in 'Polandland'), and even makes a brief sojourn in space with a tentacled alien named Doktor Froid. 'Witz,' as Cohen explains, means 'joke,' and the novel overflows with puns, allusions, and Borscht Belt zingers, in an incantatory modernist style." —New Yorker