ATTENTION: Dispatches from a Land of Distraction

by Joshua Cohen Narrated by Jonathan Davis

Overview

A wide-ranging, rule-bending collection of nonfiction from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Netanyahus
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“Attention reveals a fresh, vital literary voice as it covers seemingly every imaginable topic relating to modern life.”-Entertainment Weekly

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY WIRED

One of Granta's Best of Young American Novelists, Joshua Cohen arrives with his first collection of nonfiction, the culmination of two decades of writing and thought about life in the digital age. In essays, memoir, criticism, diary entries, and letters-many appearing here for the first time-Cohen covers the full depth and breadth of modern life: politics, literature, art, music, travel, the media, and psychology, and subjects as diverse as Google, Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders, fictional animals, Gustav Mahler, Aretha Franklin, John Zorn, landscape photography, fake Caravaggios, Wikipedia, Gertrude Stein, Edward Snowden, Jonathan Franzen, Olympic women's fencing, Atlantic City casinos, the closing of the Ringling Bros. circus, and Azerbaijan.*

Throughout ATTENTION, Cohen directs his sharp gaze at home and abroad, calling upon his extraordinary erudition and unrivaled ability to draw connections between seemingly unlike things to show us how to live without fear in a world overflowing with information. In each piece, he projects a quality of thought that is uniquely his, and a voice as witty, profound, and distinct as any in American letters.

At this crucial juncture in history, ATTENTION is a guide for the perplexed-a handbook for anyone hoping to bring the wisdom of the past into the culture of the future.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

05/14/2018
In this debut nonfiction collection, novelist Cohen (Moving Kings) muses on a variety of subjects, including politics, linguistics, history, and religion. Though the opening essay—a lament on the shallow state of societal discourse in a world crowded with distractions—is a bit stale, Cohen picks up steam in the second selection, an excoriating look at his native Atlantic City’s economic decline as an extended metaphor for President Trump’s failings, both personal and professional. In book reviews and literary essays, Cohen gives careful consideration to the work of Jonathan Franzen, Gordon Lish, and Thomas Pynchon, among others. A fascinating piece on German-Jewish fencer Helene Mayer, who competed for Germany at the 1936 Olympics, is filled with gems of historical insight, such as how European Jews had long used fencing as a “formal, relatively nonviolent way to respond to anti-Semitic provocations.” Cohen can be pretentious or obtuse, particularly in the random diary entries sprinkled throughout: “Avoid imagination,” he instructs, since “it is merely the plagiarism of your inexperience or ignorance.” At its best, Cohen’s work evokes comparisons to Gore Vidal in tone and purview, but the author lacks consistency. (Aug.)

From the Publisher

Dazzling in its scope . . . If curiosity is a writer’s greatest innate gift, Joshua Cohen may be America’s greatest living writer.”—The Washington Post 

“Cause for celebration and close study . . . [Cohen] will hunt after neglected shards of the past, minor histories, and charge them with an immediacy in the present. . . . He is experimenting with the essay form much more, and more cleverly, than any major American writer today.”—The Wall Street Journal

“In Attention, Joshua Cohen makes an eclectic argument for how to improve our lives. . . . [He] tackles a surprising range of subjects to underline distraction’s role in our fraught predicament and to argue that paying attention could help us get out of it. . . . When it comes to making sense of our times with verve and imagination, few authors are more rewarding.”—Financial Times

“Brilliant . . . Joshua Cohen—novelist, journalist, critic; prodigy, polyglot, polymath—has one of the most interesting minds in circulation. . . . Cohen is working his way through, and laying claim to, a personal imaginative geography.”—The New York Times Book Review

“Fabulous . . . funny . . . spot-on . . . There’s so much pleasure in Cohen’s sentences. . . . What thrilled me was the imaginative and transfiguring attention Cohen pays to everything he touches.”—James Wood, The New Yorker

“Prescient . . . Attention reveals a fresh, vital literary voice as it covers seemingly every imaginable topic relating to modern life, both at home and abroad.”—Entertainment Weekly

“Whip-sharp . . . Cohen here flaunts a next-level virtuosity across countless fields of expertise. . . . [He] is a phenomenal thinker whatever the theme whatever the subject: granular, acrobatic, startling.”—The Guardian

“Brilliant . . .  Cohen’s answer is that the defense of literature and the defense of the human capacity to pay attention are inextricably linked. . . . In his novels and here in his first collection of nonfiction, he seems to be trying to turn the tables, to insist, with embattled conviction, that the best way to understand a society that exists and discourses in the cloud is through the lens of the hardcover tradition of trying to read, or write, a book. It’s a moving argument, one worth readers’ attention, which is about the highest praise a reviewer can give in a world that lacks just that.”—Los Angeles Review of Books

“A grand gathering across place and time, cohered around this notion of attention—who pays it, what it costs . . . [Cohen is] a dogged and astute chronicler and critic of the internet and the culture of distraction it engenders. But Attention also pays attention, a journalist’s or even a muckraker’s attention, to the real world. To the depredations of post-crash politics and economics, the resurrection of irony and the death of facts.”—Bookforum

“Joshua Cohen has a complex and capacious consciousness.”—Harold Bloom

“Cohen, one of our crucial young novelists, has written the nonfiction novel of our moment, formed of a constellation of investigations and inklings. No one’s done such a thing so well since George Trow or Joan Didion or Norman Mailer, if ever. It’s chasteningly brilliant, and the kind of chastening we unfortunately need.”—Jonathan Lethem

“Joshua Cohen is one of my favorite nonfiction writers. This book is a cause for celebration.”—Elif Batuman

Kirkus Reviews

2018-05-28
Cohen (Moving Kings, 2017, etc.), selected as a Granta Best Young American Novelist, has been turning out big, daunting novels, and this collection of his journalistic pieces rivals them in scope and density.As he writes in a short preface, people today are way too distracted: "We're becoming too disparate, too dissociated—searching for porn one moment, searching for genocide the next—leaving behind stray data that cohere only in the mnemotech of our surveillance." It's time to pay attention, and reading these often challenging and acute essays is a start. Cohen opens with a nostalgic piece on the demise of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, which felt like the "death of jazz, or the death of the blues." Then, it's off to Atlantic City, where he once had a summer job in a casino, and a "cotton-candy-haired clown who crashed the AC party late and left it early and ugly"—Donald Trump. Next up is a piece critical of Bernie Sanders, soon followed by one on a favorite writer of Cohen's, Thomas Pynchon, and news of a new book by him. Then Cohen discusses the "deliriously acquisitive music of John Zorn," Aretha Franklin ("like Annie Oakley, she could hit anything"), Beyoncé, and Glenn Greenwald's "decent" Edward Snowden, who "excoriated the surveillance state." Throughout the collection, Cohen displays impressive range. He's equally comfortable discussing philosophy, politics, German metaphysics, Anna Kavan, Georges Perec, Mario Vargas Llosa, the internet, and Google—not to mention creating an abecedarium honoring Paris' rogue English-language publisher Obelisk. Jewishness, so prevalent in Cohen's fiction, is generously represented here as well. Sometimes overly stylistically pyrotechnic, the author refuses to wear his learning lightly, which occasionally stifles and snuffs out the good stuff.Some readers will find Cohen's writing too disparate and snarky, but for those comfortable with the Vollmann/Gass/Eggers school of writing, these essays are the cat's meow.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169470888
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	08/14/2018
Edition description:	Unabridged

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It’s a Circle
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