Overview

Trying to Fool Death comprises verse and dialogues drawn from Marvin Cohen's almost daily emails to a group of friends. It focuses on Marvin's acute awareness of his mortality; on death and living, on memories, on friendship and lost friends. 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. ""In 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 Péret, and particularly as he demonstrates his extraordinary power over words and word associations that break down the expected ones."" - Anna Balakian, Surrealism: The Road to the Absolute

Full Product Details

9798218191016

Table of Contents

Reviews

Author Information

Marvin Cohen (born July 6, 1931), is the author of a number of episodic novels, plays and verse, a book on baseball, and several collections of shorter pieces-stories, dialogues, parables, and idiosyncratic essays. His work has also appeared in more than 100 publications, from the experimental to the mainstream, including: Ambit, Antaeus, Assembling (""a collection of otherwise unpublishable writings""), The Beat Scene (alongside Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Corso), Chelsea, Fiction, The Hudson Review, Thomas Merton's Monks Pond, New Directions in Prose and Poetry, The Transatlantic Review, The New York Times, Harper's Bazaar and Vogue.Cohen was born in Brooklyn, New York City. He has described himself as one who has ""risen from lower-class background to lower-class foreground."" He studied art at Cooper Union but left college to focus on writing. He supported himself with a series of short-term jobs including mink farmer and merchant seaman. He later taught creative writing at various New York colleges. He is married and currently lives with his wife in Manhattan.

Tab Content 6

Countries Available