Description: "The sort of postmodern epic that arrives like a comet about once every decade, like Infinite Jest or Gravity's Rainbow. Like any epic, it defies summary and overflows with puns, allusions, digressions, authorial sleights of hand and structural gags-in the tradition of Thomas Pynchon, James Joyce, Jonathan Swift and Laurence Sterne." --New York Observer "Reversing and resisting what Cohen sees as the contemporary Jewish novel's tendency to market the past as a 'fashion,' with 'minorities overcoming obstacles,' this novel is a linguistic extravaganza that negates reader expectations... Witz is a brave and artful attempt to explore and explode the limits of the sentence."--Stephen Burn, The New York Times "In this ambitious novel, Benjamin Israelien--born full grown, bearded, and wearing glasses--is the last living Jew, a national celebrity and Messiah-like great hope for an America terrified of losing God's grace. In more than eight hundred pages of dense, often self-amused prose, he tours in a big revival show, visits Holocaust sites ("Whateverwitz" in "Polandland"), and even makes a brief sojourn in space with a tentacled alien named Doktor Froid. "Witz," as Cohen explains, means "joke," and the novel overflows with puns, allusions, and Borscht Belt zingers, in an incantatory modernist style." --New Yorker "The art of Witz is in the delivery. JC's prose has a breathless rhythm and endless associations, e.g. wombs, ovens, babies, bread, incineration. He can't get the words out fast enough, such genius, so talented he is, 'poo poo poo.'" --Jeffra Hays, Dactyl Review "Cohen's sentences cascade on and on, with clause after clause snaking down the page. Then a lone period allows you a rest and the next sentence attacks a sensory assault. If I had to compare Witz to anything it would be to the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch." --Johnathan Frederick Post, The Millions "A reminder of the serious import of the literary novel, the novel as linguistic artefact." --TLS "The kind of ambitious, intelligent novel of ideas that will demand your full attention for 824 pages and repay you by rewiring your cerebral cortex in a fundamental way." --The Stranger "Entertaining, adventurous and delightfully absurd." --Time Out New York "A compelling... primal plea for a return of a tradition to its messy, marginal, but living roots." --BN Review "The great lyrical sweeps of Cohen's writing must be applauded." --Library Journal "[Cohen] reminds us what literature is: the self-conscious representation of the word using language." --Forward "Cohen packs whole histories and destructions, maps and traditions, into single sentences. He employs lists, codes, and invented syntax with the sure hand of a visionary, his prowess and passion further emboldened by a boundless sense of scope." --Believer

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