The Here and Now » (Reprint)

Robert Cohen is the author of three previous novels, The Organ Builder, The Here and Now, and Inspired Sleep, and a collection of short stories. Winner of a Lila Atcheston Wallace -Reader's Digest Writers Award, the Ribalow Prize, The Pushcart Prize, and a Whiting Award, he has published short fiction in a variety of publications — including Harpers, GQ, The Paris Review and Ploughshares. He has taught at the Iowa Writers Workshop, Harvard University, and Middlebury College. He lives in Vermont.

The Here and Now is the story of a chance encounter and the tumult that ensues when opposites (or apparent ones) turn into strange attractors. Samuel Karnish, a no-longer-quite-so-young editor at a Manhattan newsmagazine, has watched his career run aground, his marriage disintegrate, and his worldview shrink almost to the vanishing point. On the flight to his best friend Warren Pinsky's third wedding, he finds himself thrust into an awkward friendship with a young Hasidic couple from Brooklyn, a friendship that leads him on a strange and provocative odyssey and sends him reeling in the direction of what may be his truest self. As we are drawn in to the lives of this unlikely threesome, we see the moral confusions and crossed purposes that threaten believers and nonbelievers alike with estrangement from others and themselves.

Publishers Weekly

A disaffected New Yorker finds his life changed by a chance encounter with an Orthodox Jewish couple. (Jan.)