Robert Cohen

Robert Cohen (born 1957) is an American novelist and short fiction writer. Life Cohen grew up in Westfield, New Jersey. He attended UC Berkeley and subsequently received his MFA from Columbia University. Works Cohen's themes center around issues of contemporary identity and transcendence. His writing has been praised as "wild and ingenious" by The New York Times, "formidable" by The Atlantic Monthly, and "ruefully funny" by the San Francisco Chronicle. DG Meyers of A Commonplace Blog writes, "Sentence by sentence, Robert Cohen is perhaps the best prose stylist of any American novelist now writing." His first novel, The Organ Builder, was praised by the New York Times Book Review as "an intimate, stunningly written portrait of a man and his reluctant confrontation with the past … all narrated in a voice that often approaches sheer poetry." His second, The Here and Now, won the Ribalow Prize for Best Jewish Novel of 1996. His third novel, Inspired Sleep, was called "a sparkling comic novel of postmodern pathologies…more than just a brilliant book – it's a transporting read" and "a great fat multiplex of a novel, beautifully written, funny, moving, sardonic and sad, it's a brilliantly executed indictment of our biomechanistic age, where there's a cure for every ache and, more importantly, an ache for every cure."