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Also included are two short theater-related pieces (How He\/She Dramatizes His\/Her Life and A Complaint as a Theatre Goer), an excerpt from a 1981 interview, and a new brief preface written by Cohen for this collection.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49594327564561,"sku":"GOR012789118","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51004093989137,"sku":"NIN9780578689067","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52689978229009,"sku":"NLS9780578689067","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0578689065.jpg?v=1751168236"},{"product_id":"monday-rhetoric-of-the-love-club-other-parables-book-marvin-cohen-9780811204750","title":"The Monday Rhetoric of the Love Club, \u0026 Other Parables","description":"“Marvin Cohen’s wacky humor,” the late Thomas Merton once said, “has something of ’Thurber, something of Steinberg, Buster Keaton, the surrealists, the French pataphysicians.” And this in itself is a fair enough assessment, to say the very least, of The Monday Rhetoric of the Love Club, a collection of twenty-one of the prolific Cohen’s parables, prose poems, fables, and dialogues. Two of the pieces, including the title story, originally appeared in the New Directions in Prose and Poetry series; most of the others were selected from the many other magazines and anthologies in England and the United States in which Cohen’s shorter works have been published.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49627628011793,"sku":"GOR012882812","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0811204758.jpg?v=1751107212"},{"product_id":"self-devoted-friend-rare-book-marvin-cohen-1694609869bwa","title":"Self-Devoted Friend","description":"1967. First Published. 159 pages. Signed by the author. Pictorial dust jacket over grey cloth. Flat signed by author to title page. Binding remains firm. Pages are lightly tanned throughout. Previous","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50084830871825,"sku":"1694609869BWA","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1694609869BWA_1.jpg?v=1722920867"},{"product_id":"baseball-as-metaphysics-book-marvin-cohen-9780692967515","title":"Baseball as Metaphysics","description":"\u003cp\u003eCohen is a superfan, and he has written an intellectual manual for his co-religionists. They know who they are and they will cherish this manual. But anyone who has spent a soft, green afternoon, his shirt open at the throat to the sun, the whistles and chatter of the infield drifting up to the edge of his mind, watching, absorbing, taking in a baseball game, will cherish it.\u003cbr\u003e -- From the introduction by Jim Bouton, former Major League pitcher and author of the 1970 controversial bestseller \u003cem\u003eBall Four\u003c\/em\u003e.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e Originally published in 1974 as \u003cem\u003eBaseball the Beautiful: Decoding the Diamond\u003c\/em\u003e, this new paperback edition has been completely reformatted and contains the full text of the original version. According to the bio that Marvin Cohen, now 86, wrote for his website, the original publisher took the liberty of changing the book's now restored title for commercial feasibility and to bring in the lumbering lowbrow audience.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e This new edition also contains a later essay that did not appear in the original, and the author has also written a new foreword.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51006055055633,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51006057939217,"sku":"NIN9780692967515","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52486653673745,"sku":"NLS9780692967515","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0692967516.jpg?v=1751199155"},{"product_id":"others-including-morstive-sternbump-book-marvin-cohen-9780692788486","title":"Others, Including Morstive Sternbump","description":null,"brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51006070194449,"sku":"NIN9780692788486","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52434600821009,"sku":"NLS9780692788486","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0692788484.jpg?v=1751105514"},{"product_id":"self-devoted-friend-book-marvin-cohen-9780692872819","title":"The Self-Devoted Friend","description":"\u003cp\u003e50th-anniversary edition of critically acclaimed writer Marvin Cohen's debut fiction. Not quite a novel, the book is best described as a series of humorous philosophical dialogues between the narrator and his other self, touching on a vast array of subjects such as birth, love, art, nature, religion, death, and everything in between.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e A mere 1,500 hardcover copies of \u003cem\u003eThe Self-Devoted Friend\u003c\/em\u003e were printed in London by publisher Rapp \u0026amp; Carroll Limited in 1967, 750 of which were imported by New Directions Publishing for distribution in the United States. According to Cohen, New Directions publisher James Laughlin explained his decision behind the very limited edition by saying it was only for the happy few. Despite its overwhelmingly positive critical reception, no further copies of the book were ever produced. Completely reformatted, this new paperback edition contains the full text of the original and the author has also written a new brief introduction.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e When I was an unpublished writer 55 years ago, I lived in the same crummy tenement as Marvin Cohen in New York, and got to know him and his extraordinary writing. To me he was the Beckett of Avenue B -- funnier, more accessible, but just as determined to show us the world in a new way. Cohen is the chronicler of frustration, and \u003cem\u003eThe Self-Devoted Friend\u003c\/em\u003e is just one of his masterpieces. \u003cem\u003e\u003cstrong\u003ePaul Theroux\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e It is rare these days -- perhaps, any days -- to come across a work that not only reveals a striking, fresh talent, but stands outside current literary preoccupations. What Mr. Cohen has is his own: a joy in language, and an eye, at once innocent and shrewd, for the paradoxes inherent in the human condition. He puts both language and people through their paces, stands them on their heads, and hugs them to his heart in what amounts as a tour de force of serio-comedy, a sort of superb clowning in which pathos and absurdity intertwine as they do in a Charlie Chaplin film. \u003cem\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eThe New York Times Book Review\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e Cohen surrealistically juxtaposes ideas, seeks irrational and fantastic links, but for the high purposes of verbal comedy and linguistic entertainment.\u003cem\u003e \u003cstrong\u003eThe New Statesman\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e (London)\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e Marvin Cohen's wacky humor has something of Thurber, something of Steinberg, Buster Keaton, the surrealists, the pataphysicians. \u003cem\u003eThe Self-Devoted Friend\u003c\/em\u003e is a book that should be read immediately by all who gladly recognize themselves to be half crazy. \u003cem\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eThomas Merton\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e Such discontinuous fictions as \u003cem\u003eFinnegans Wake\u003c\/em\u003e or \u003cem\u003eNaked Lunch\u003c\/em\u003e or Marvin Cohen's \u003cem\u003eThe Self-Devoted Friend\u003c\/em\u003e would store more suitably than nineteenth-century novels. \u003cem\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eRichard Kostelanetz\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51006093295889,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51006097064209,"sku":"NIN9780692872819","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51830639788305,"sku":"GOR014416624","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51842785378577,"sku":"CIN0692872817G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52121989808401,"sku":"NLS9780692872819","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0692872817.jpg?v=1750847536"},{"product_id":"loving-candace-book-marvin-cohen-9781963846140","title":"Loving Candace","description":null,"brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51060455702801,"sku":"NIN9781963846140","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52654147928337,"sku":"NLS9781963846140","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1963846141.jpg?v=1750965381"},{"product_id":"life-s-tumultuous-party-book-marvin-cohen-9781944697877","title":"Life's Tumultuous Party","description":"Fiction. Literary Nonfiction. Parties are my library, says notorious party-crasher, Lower East Side denizen, and exuberantly idiosyncratic prose stylist Marvin Cohen. In this surrealistic suite of stories, dialogues and other party-dances, Cohen dissects party-going as both celebrant and philosopher, romping in the wildness and mystery of parties and finding there the pulse and throb and beat of our individual and collective natures. 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Ellipsis is the predominant quality: the reader is asked to accept this material, this disparate substance strung together with associate devices . . . Parts are superbly comic  though it does not] afford the reader easy entrance . . . It deserves reading; there is, at least, nothing quite like it. Cohen is trying to explore the possibilities and expand the limits of the fictional form. For this, and for the large measure of success he achieves, attention is due him.  \u003cem\u003eNew Worlds\u003c\/em\u003e, #181, April 1968]\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eOver fifty years later, there is still nothing quite like it, except, of course, Marvin's subsequent writings.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe first part of this book comes from Marvin Cohen's big shoe-box of unpublished typescripts, mainly dating from the 1970s and 1980s. 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Gervasi is a kind of necessary mythic extrapolation of the ego, an imaginary counterweight to the reality of self-loss, a King Midas whose limitless power is his own undoing, and who is ultimately shown, through Cohen's Cubist technique of exhaustively presenting every perspective on his character, to exist in a kind of Hell of spiritual isolation and inability to love. As always, Cohen writes with a vigorous wit; his poetic dialect reforges the English language into utterly original, surprising and delightful forms. Written in the late 70s and never before published, this novel is one of a pair with INSIDE THE WORLD: AS AL LEHMAN (published simultaneously), Cohen's novel about a non-Don Juan.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52473783517457,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52473784434961,"sku":"NLS9781944697563","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9781944697563.jpg?v=1759840465"},{"product_id":"inside-the-world-book-marvin-cohen-9781944697587","title":"Inside the World","description":"Fiction. 2018 Foreword INDIES Finalist for Literary Adult Fiction. Al Lehman is a bourgeois Everyman, whose true nature is mysterious, radically unformed, incomplete, and frustrated, even as the quotidian circumstances of his life are drearily grounded in a fixed temporal reality. In this episodic novel, comic and philosophical, written in the late 70s in Cohen's highly idiosyncratic and extraordinarily poetic language, different aspects of Lehman's quest to exist in the scope of finitude, in the belly of a universe that does not fully nourish him, but is the source of all nourishment, are brilliantly distilled. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eINSIDE THE WORLD: AS AL LEHMAN is a companion novel to WOMEN, AND TOM GERVASI, whose central figure could be Lehman's wish-fulfilling dream projection: a Don Juan who exists in a world of limitless physical and emotional gratification. Taken together, the two novels comprise a kind of comedic Either\/Or in which are explored a wide range of the merits and dismerits of the real and ideal.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52474315899153,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52474318913809,"sku":"NLS9781944697587","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9781944697587.jpg?v=1759841081"},{"product_id":"run-out-of-prose-book-marvin-cohen-9781944697648","title":"Run Out of Prose","description":"Poetry. When asked by a friend why he recently he had been writing only poetry, Marvin Cohen, octogenarian author of many novels, stories, essays and plays, quipped that he had run out of prose. It would be as apt to say that, in these delightfully carefree rhymed homilies about the irreducible vagaries of life, death, and evolution, he has leapt off the ground, into the air.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52531923124497,"sku":"NLS9781944697648","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9781944697648.jpg?v=1760658627"},{"product_id":"how-to-outthink-a-wall-book-marvin-cohen-9789811101182","title":"How to Outthink a Wall","description":"\u003cp\u003eWho \u003cem\u003eis\u003c\/em\u003e Marvin Cohen? Brooklyn-born New Yorker Marvin Cohen published numerous surreal and whimsical fictions in books and magazines from 1967 to 1982. This anthology showcases the two modes of Cohen's writing: short 'dialogues' operating in the manner of an Ionesco or Beckett script by inverting language with an eschatological hopelessness while revelling, rather than despairing, in life's absurdity, and longer stories displaying Cohen's unique style and knack for shaping language in novel ways: his repetitions, random exclamations, and bestowing on abstract nouns abstract qualities. Cohen has an ear for the music of the absurd on a par with Donald Barthelme, mixing the flip whimsy, astute and wry observation, and verbal heft, with a fondness for paradoxes and intellectual riddles. His incessant probing of the weird crevices of existence makes reading Cohen a perpetual pleasure. 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The pieces obsessively work and rework these themes, with a viewpoint varying from the joyous to the despairing, and from the stark to the absurd.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn Marvin Cohen one senses the metaphysical thirst, as he questions the notion of reality, as he distorts accepted relationships of time and death, as he approaches dark subjects with the good-natured humour reminiscent of Benjamin P ret, and particularly as he demonstrates his extraordinary power over words and word associations that break down the expected ones. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e- Anna Balakian, Surrealism: The Road to the Absolute\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53132052726033,"sku":"GOR014762188","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":53641025945873,"sku":"NLS9798218191016","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9798218191016.jpg?v=1771288422"},{"product_id":"necessary-ends-book-marvin-cohen-9780881459104","title":"Necessary Ends","description":"\u003cp\u003eNECESSARY ENDS involves two couples who tangle in a philosophical farce about love, language, sex, time, and death. A collaboration with the director James Milton, it was privately auditioned to producer Joseph Papp, with Wallace Shawn, Andre Gregory, Angela Pietropinto, and Gretchen Van Riper in the four roles.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e The term 'character' was coined with Marvin Cohen in mind. A gentle observer of the unpredictable and slightly absurd, Marvin has a fondness for mankind that is unmistakably his own. Sometimes I think of him as a comedian-chronicler standing at the center, his head turned slightly toward your line of speaking to accomodate his hearing aid. NECESSARY ENDS is the sum of these parts, as Marvin positions and repositions people within relationships, that ever-aimed ear to the pun and odd bits of conversation, as though he's walking slowly through a cocktail party. The strength of his writing stems from his baroque sense of humor and his ability to see both the world and himself as wonderfully delightful miscreants.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eJoseph Papp, from his Introduction to Plays from the New York Shakespeare Festival\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":53429869904145,"sku":"NIN9780881459104","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780881459104.jpg?v=1776418352"},{"product_id":"pete-the-photographer-other-impressions-book-marvin-cohen-9798218678715","title":"Pete, the Photographer \u0026 Other Impressions","description":"\u003cp\u003eIn Pete, the Photographer, Marvin Cohen pays tribute to Henri Michaux's hallucinatory travelogues. This weird and disturbing novella, part picaresque, part surreal, follows the path of the half-blind Pete from birth to exile and further exile, battling sentient towers and the sea itself, armed only with his trusty camera.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe other pieces in this collection are similarly idiosyncratic and thought-provoking: from the frenzy of a perpetual-motion basketball player to the celebrity of a living statue; from the speculations of a would-be intergalactic taxi driver to the ambitions of a mobster in heaven. And there is even a dialogue that tries to discourse on everything \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":53640033632529,"sku":"NLS9798218678715","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9798218678715.jpg?v=1781013963"},{"product_id":"leaping-squirrel-and-other-exchanges-book-marvin-cohen-9798234075291","title":"The Leaping Squirrel and Other Exchanges","description":null,"brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53651967639825,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":53651967869201,"sku":"NLS9798234075291","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9798234075291.jpg?v=1781225199"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/collections\/author-books-by-marvin-cohen.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}