Then it covered itself with a shawl, tugged from a puddle in its lap--the fringe of that rug of bearskin, omnivorously soiled, full of thistle. Joshua Cohen's collection of four longish stories sort of left me baffled. Mr. Wallace is dead and yet some keep praying and practicing as if only by inertia (or habit). Sorry for the parody of Nietzsche's Gay Science, but i was bit confused by this insistence of self-awareness. We see narrative repeatedly derailed by distraction, detail and the knowledg...

I enjoyed the first three stories. Especially the framing Berlin sequence in the first, since I started this on my flight after 10 days in that city. Then "Sent" just seemed to go on and on. And on.

The four parts of Four New Messages are described in the blurb as ‘audacious fictions’ – definitely a more accurate label than ‘short stories’. Cohen writes brilliantly as Cohen always does, but there’s little to connect with in these pieces other than the style. What style it is, though – language to make you gasp, sentences that seem to reinvent what sentences can do. I don’t know if I will remember the people or situations depicted in these fictions, but they consolidated my faith in the auth...

Joshua Cohen’s collection of four short stories leans towards embodying a question pertinent to the time of its release, in the early 2000’s; what is literature’s place in the internet age? Cohen tends towards an approach of amalgamation, taking the zeitgeist of modernity and attempting to synthesize it into his literary approach. Not to say that he shies away from the overly-literary; his writing is literary as fuck, almost academic in approach. His work is Literature with a capital L. It’s lit...

I couldn't get past the first story. It felt like Cohen was trying too hard to be controversial. He failed at any rate.

I'm not sure how to rate Cohen on a star scale. He spits some mean sentences- and some serious meta fiction. He kind of reminds me of Michael Jordan, but while he was in highschool. In the sense that he is still perfecting his craft, but there is a noticeable brilliance slowly emerging. Emission was the most engaging story of the four in a traditional sense and by the last story, which also happens to be the longest, I was in a sense burned out. Note to self in the future go back and read the la...

For the most part, Joshua Cohen’s Four New Messages explores the brutal presentness technology contributes to our overdriven, twentyfirstcenturized modi. Specifically, it deals with gross termination of privacy and the end of an era where innocent embarrassments and personal faux pas could remain privately shamed. In Cohen’s world, even less than nothing is sacred. The age of the internet, as this collection aggressively insists, is one of blown (no pun intended) cover and ruination from dissolv...

Let's meet up and get coffee and talk about this book IRL.

On the very first page of Joshua Cohen’s latest book, a quartet of M to L size stories, he describes a writer's move from New York to Berlin and—in lieu of an exhaustive description of Berlin’s collective attitude towards working—beckons the reader to:"Take a pen, write this on a paper scrap, then when you’re near a computer, search:www.visitberlin.deAlternately, you could just keep clicking your finger on that address until this very page wears out—until you've wiped the ink away and accessed n...

We send messages every day. Thoughtlessly, dutifully, compulsively. In 21st-century America, sending messages is how we communicate.But sometimes “sending a message” has another connotation, whereby the act of doing one thing communicates something else. A politician who opens her campaign in her opponent’s hometown “sends a message” that she’s going to be aggressive. A man who takes his wife to the Italian restaurant where he proposed is declaring more than a desire for meatballs. These message...

"The College Borough" and "Emission" are two of the best short works of fiction I've read in a long time.

This was a very pleasant surprise.Last year I read Joshua Cohen’s 800-page Witz and absolutely abhorred it. Although ubiquitously compared to Gravity’s Rainbow and Infinite Jest, I suspect, because of its girth and wordiness, it doesn't even come close to the oxygen-depriving altitudes of those two works as Witz is nothing more than surface-level linguistic gymnastics. GR and IJ are mountains; Witz is a flowery field. A very, very big flowery field. Never has a book so desperately needed to be w...

I was lured to this by James Wood, who included this in the New Yorker top 2012 books. The first story "Emissions" made me feel old and cranky. Sex, drugs, computer hacking -- sigh. So much energy. But so unpredictable. Great ending.The second one, "McDonald's" is so intricately metafictional that it became a confusing morass of embryonic concepts. Some bits here and there are terrific, but overall, I want to shake him: "Just say it!""The Bed", being the first part of "Sent", was wonderful - alm...

Cohen is a babbler. Like James Joyce, Thomas Pynchon, et al., his sentences are long, winding exercises in syntactic hysterics. He moves between neurosis, wit, despair and epiphany with the pedal-to-the-floor kind of energy of someone who wants to tell you about everything (in every thematic register) at once. I'm not sure these stories, all of which crack wise in one way or another on our overtly technologized, deeply interneted lives, are really anything more than an excuse to string together

Wow, I can't believe I finished this--what a bore. The first story (hapless drug dealer is screwed by story on Internet) had a good idea as a kernel, but it was way too long and diffuse. The second was also too long, but had a decent ending. The last two were simply terrible.I read this on the basis of a favorable review from Rachel Kushner, in the NYTimes. Note to self: Her taste is opposite mine. If she dislikes something, I might like it. I honestly thought she was joking with this line: "In

Some time has passed since I read this, robbing me of my initial impressions but also causing me to realise what little impression it made on me. Stylistically and thematically, Cohen (a New Books editor at Harper's magazine) attempts to conjure the feel of the Way We Live Now. Each of these four novellas comes with a URL, and the title and content allude to contemporary WWW-related issues (the instantaneity of email, the ubiquity of porn, online shaming). In our high-speed culture, though, tech...

Four New Messages are four stories that speak of life revolving around the technological age. People whose lives are altered and dependant on that technology, and who at times fight against it. In “Emission”, an unintentional slip of the tongue leads to a rumor that finds massive escalation with the aid of the internet. The protagonist Mono, seeking to eliminate his sudden infamy and reclaim his autonomy and anonymous nature, requests the aid of a “Digital Paralegal”, as she calls herself. Howe...

The first story was great- an intelligent stream of consciousness mixed with a funny play on words. The other three were a bit too rambling, conceptual and pretentious.

I was mildly disappointed by this book, as well as confused about what all the buzz was about. It's not that I didn't get it, just that there wasn't anything to get. Still, I reviewed it at the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography, which you can find here: http://bit.ly/13yy2fo--How many authors' mere mention in a cover blurb (i.e. this author is like that one) is enough to force you to pick up a book? For me, the list is short, and one name on it is David Foster Wallace.The Wallace com...