A Heaven of Others

Joshua Cohen 

Release Date: April 15, 2011
ISBN: 978-0984213382

Price: $20.00

eBook Price: $7.99

DESCRIPTION

At age 23, before he had begun his contemporary landmark novel, Witz, Joshua Cohen composed this novel of a 10 year-old Israeli boy exploded by an equally young Palestinian suicide bomber, who arrives in a heaven no one in his tradition has prepared him for. A Heaven of Others stands at the crossroads of a conflicted city, Jerusalem, and word-play that both celebrates and dismantles tradition.

REVIEWS

"Reading A Heaven of Others... there was that same kind of shock one gets when entering certain works of Faulkner or Woolf or Joyce, where you simultaneously are thrilled and a little intimidated by the surface, but it doesn’t take you long to fall into it, since the text is teaching you how to read the text. It’s been so long since I’ve discovered a book like that." —Kyle Minor, The Rumpus

"Joshua Cohen has created a visionary novel that is terrifying and heartbreaking and humbling in its luminous brilliance. In my view, it firmly places the author on the same level as Kafka." —Michael Disend, author of Stomping the Goyim

"The idea that there are multiple heavens, right ones and wrong ones, white ones and black ones, is pushed to its fantastical limits by Brooklyn writer Joshua Cohen in his dream-world novel of the afterlife... Heaven is a challenging but rewarding read on thematic and formal levels." —The Brooklyn Rail

"It is poignant and profound to refract one’s religious doubt this way through a religious mirror, brave to structure an epic novella around religious terrorism in which belief interrogates itself, through its own manifestations, which is something like God seeing himself in the passing surface he has created. Cohen engages his own religion in the terms of that religion, in its own language, which he recreates using myths—like wind-up Schulzian toys—cast in Semitic-syncretic mold, bursting with contradiction."  —The New Haven Review

"A breathless flight of controlled delirium, an exquisitely blasphemous tour of an afterlife where earth's dominion, in all its terror and glory, trumps the miraculous and overturns the world to come... It's a brave book that should earn its young author the reader's profound and enduring admiration."—Steve Stern, author of The Frozen Rabbi