ugh. This was a mixed bag for me. The author has so much insight and can be so tedious at the same time - the balance of these two factors within each individual essay varied substantially for me.

Great and thought provokingAttention by Joshua Cohen is a great and thought provoking book driving into a variety of topics from musician John Zorn, neuroscience, novelist Charles Newman and the particle/ wave theory of light all connected to the study of Attention. Reading this book will enthral you and increase your vocabulary. Great read!

I am even bigger fan now. Great essays, interspersed with interesting fragments. Surprisingly, "abroad" topics work way better than the "home" topics. Thought the reportage from Cohen's native Atlantic City and Trump was excellent.

Joshua Cohen is a witty, intelligent writer who is able to convey the Life and Times of the intellectual in the modern day. This collection showcases the renaissance man who wrote it by connecting disparate stories and ideas into a cohesive (if sometimes abstract) narrative on Attention, Information Awareness, and how individuals [are able to] communicate with one another. The ethnography of the Circus and its use as critique of the American political system was entertaining and brilliant. This

I'm wavering between a 3.5 and 4 stars for Joshua Cohen's mammoth essay collection, Attention. I loved a lot of the early essays here, but some of them are too navel-gazingly pretentious even for my tastes. Then comes the title essay, a book length (160 pages!) essay tracing the intellectual history of concepts relating to attention. Let's just say that, to me, there's a reason that slab of wordwork was affixed to this book and not its own publication. If it wasn't there, the 400 page version of...

"To my mind, Israel is the only contemporary Jewish subject, or the last contemporary Jewish subject not kitsch. Reading a popular novel about Israel (there aren’t more than a few) is like reading a Holocaust novel (of which there are many), but backward: the last page (death or escape from death) coming first, the first page (bourgeois respectability, bourgeois self-loathing) coming last. Right to left: Popular Israeli novels are just novels about the Holocaust read right to left."

When your typical hack takes up a topic like 'attention', you can expect the sort of neat-and-tidy-malcolm-gladwell-bob's-your-uncle explanation that sells books in airports; suppress the details in favor of easy digestibility. To paraphrase Ezra Pound the average reader has such habitually slack attention that he will only read when and where the pap can be lapped off the page without any effort whatsoever. Cohen compels and invites a reading of these essays with a sustained attention and curio...

This book is not bad, it’s just not what I was expecting from the title. I was expecting a collection of essays focusing on attention, information excess, and things like that. Instead, the book has several essays, letters, diary notes, etc, on several random topics, from Donald Trump to the letter j. While I liked some of the short diary notes, I didn’t really enjoy reading some long political pieces. If you are familiar with the author and what he writes, then this book might be great for you....

Okay so but I won't make that comparison with DFW. But. I do think there's that pigeon=hole that works well for me, that being the Smart Young Talented Author of A FAT=Novel Writes Essays.

5 stars if you're looking for something to put you to sleep

There's some profoundly good writing in this collection, and Cohen commands the language in a way very few contemporary essayists have or can (David Foster Wallace is the only comparable one who comes to mind). However, the overall impact of this book would be greatly augmented by subtraction - there are just too many essays included on subjects that are too obscure/inaccessible to even the most well-read, well-versed reader. Many of the pieces which could have been culled appear to be book forw...

I like Joshua Cohen, but I put off reading this for a long while -- in large part because I was annoyed by Cohen's facile hit pieces years ago in BOOKFORUM. This was clearly beneath a writer as brilliant as Cohen. Thankfully, these embarrassing early pieces are largely elided in this fantastic essay collection, which covers a remarkably wide range of topics. The Atlantic City essay is one of the highlights. But Cohen goes wild on everything from obscure writers to the Internet itself. This cat h...

I'm one of Mr. Cohen's fiercest supporters. His fiction is first rate. His Books column in Harper's was one of the few vital monthly columns about literature published in the United States. His journalism in GQ and other publications has caused me to renew subscriptions in the past.So I'm a huge fan of Cohen. And spoiler alert: this book is full of insights about the America of today, but also about the state of literature and thinking about literature. In what other writer's work can you find a...

Cohen's writing reflects his intelligence and sharp wit. He has a passion for the written word and is clearly a very curious individual about a wide swath of topics. So why am I giving this only three stars? I guess I am not as curious as he is. There are a lot of interesting pieces in this collection, but there are also several essays that cover topics that simply did not interest me. So, even though the pieces I liked are excellent, I'm going to settle with a strong three stars and call this a...

Consider the relationship between depression and taste, or discernment. Both lead to exclusion. Soon you can't stand any TV or movie or even any book. Soon nothing can satisfy. But while the depressed person encounters everything with a sense of pointlessness, what ultimately alienates the person of taste is the feeling of compromise, or of being compromised.*****Conversation Summary (Next Table)A woman recounts a dream in which she had sex with a celebrity. Her boyfriend, or husband, gets angry...

I ended up giving up after getting through several chapters of this. - Book shot into several chapters on American Politics right away. If I want to read about politics I'll go that route specifically, but I'm sick to death of it bleeding into everything. - There were some interesting points made with some of the chapters, but almost halfway through and it didn't seem to be clearly converging on a point very obviously. This is probably because this book, as I understand it, is an anthology of st...

The title, I now see, having finished reading-slash-paging through the book, is a pre-emptive defense. Yes, these pieces are overwordy, abstruse and (whisper it) kind of annoying, but you probably only think that because you’ve lost the ability to slow down, focus and PAY ATTENTION. Anyway, that’s my admittedly cynical interpretation. There are some good ideas in here, and the quality of writing is high, but damn there’s just too much meandering sludge. My attention is strong, and Cohen tested i...

I found this collection of essays to be incredibly insightful and thought-provoking. It's showed me a better way to think about the world around me, rather than focusing on the endless churn of daily headlines. The essay on the end of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus (and how Trump has coopted the techniques of the three-ring circus) is a highlight, as is the essay on Trump and the fall of Atlantic City. Both these pieces go far deeper than the usual politics articles you see these

“A writer stands outside of a story yelling, ‘Open sesame!’ and then, what do you know, the story, as if it were a seed opens. And treasure is found inside. That treasure, of course, is just another story, and it all begins again.”A wide-ranging compendium of essays from the endlessly curious Joshua Cohen. I liked almost all of it and learned a great deal, but I liked the final large section (Attention: A (Short) History) less than I expected. His tone suddenly became stiff and didactic, contras...

Keeping my attention focused was at times challenging, but thah had more to do with too much than not enough erudition on display. Looking up the meaning of mondegreen was distracting but necessary; there is not enough time in the day to track down all the allusions, but those I did were generally worth it, whether or not I will actually expand my vocabulary. This was quite a distraction on the way to reading his new novel N.