James Wood, The New Yorker book critic, reviews MFA Guest Speaker Joshua Cohen’s novel Moving Kings.

Manchester, NH, July 25, 2017 -- Staff writer and book critic at The New Yorker, James Wood is one of the biggest names in literary criticism. Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and National Magazine Award for reviews and criticism, Wood has some very complimentary words for Joshua Cohen’s newest novel, Moving Kings. Cohen’s novel explores the lives of two Gaza War veterans, Yoav and Uri, who come to New York to work for their distant cousin David King, proprietor of King’s Moving Inc. The two men, who served in the Israel Defense Forces, must adjust to civilian life as they work as eviction-movers. Wood’s review delves deep into Cohen’s writing and the structure of his novel. Cohen, who was a recent guest author at the Mountainview Low-Residency MFA at Southern New Hampshire University, has received a stunning review from James Wood: 

“Joshua Cohen is an extraordinary prose stylist, surely one of the most prodigious at work in American fiction today. (And he is only thirty-six.) At his best, he resembles Saul Bellow: his sentences are all-season journeyers, able to do everything everywhere at once. He can be witty, slangy, lyrical, ironic, vivid; he possesses leaping powers of metaphor and analogy. Most writers develop certain talents at the expense of others, but Cohen relishes verbs as much as adjectives, metaphor-making as much as epigram-minting. Style is a patent priority: his fiction displays the stretch marks of its originality.”

“The atmosphere at times resembles a Jewish “Sopranos,” minus the violence—men, family, moneymaking, muscle.”

“Wary of conventional payoffs, or even of conventional rises and falls, he likes to swerve away from a story or a character he has spent many pages establishing, in search of a fresh center of interest.”

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Ben Nugent
Southern New Hampshire University 
[email protected]