How to Outthink a Wall: An Anthology

Who is 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 Cohens 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 lifes absurdity and longer stories displaying Cohens 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. This anthology collects Cohens four volumes of short fiction.His stories are bursting with inventiveness and have a way of posing awkward questions--this when most of the worlds story writers are content with dry observation or mere character assassination. -- The Times Literary Supplement