Witz: The Story of the Last Jew on Earth »

Joshua Cohen was born in 1980 in New Jersey. He is the author of five books, including the novels Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto, A Heaven of Others, and Witz. Cohen’s essays have appeared in The Forward, Nextbook, The Believer, and Harper’s. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.

One of the great comic epics of our time: the Last Jewish Novel about the Last Jew in the World.

The Barnes & Noble Review

. . . It's the cross-country cinematics of [the protagonist's] escape -- and, of course, the doorstop heft -- that suggests Witz as this decade's Infinite Jest or White Noise, the young man's big picaresque of ideas. In truth, it's much too insular, too slapdash, too particularist for the comparison. Cohen's is a novel of one idea, and as such, could be comfortably shorter by 400 pages or more, though I wouldn't want to be the one making the cuts. Indeed, Witz's witty and wearing logorrhea does ultimately persuade, if only as an ironic feint for Cohen's real achievement, and promise: a fiction featuring heterodox Jewish experiences -- among other things -- that aren't gravely universal or world-historical, that can once again be small, specific, situated, and strange.