If you’re in New York City, novelist—and Tablet Magazine literary critic—Joshua Cohen will be at BookCourt in Brooklyn tonight, celebrating the release of Witz, his 817-page comic novel about The Last Jew on Earth, at a party hosted by Tablet Magazine editor-in-chief Alana Newhouse. To get a sense of what we’re dealing with here, check out this recent profile of Cohen in the New York Observer. “For all its gags,” the Observer says, “[Witz] was conceived with a singular aesthetic mission: to put an end to the novel of Jewish kitsch, Holocausts with happy endings. ‘The targets might be Michael Chabon, Jonathan Safran Foer, Shalom Auslander,’ Mr. Cohen told me. ‘When I started this book, I wanted to sleep with their wives. By the time I finished, I wanted to sleep with their mothers.’ ”
A Nice Jewish Boy’s Naughty Big Novel [NY Observer]
Ari M. Brostoff is Culture Editor at Jewish Currents.