Most Popular Books by Matt Cohen

Now that academic consensus has turned away from the dichotomy between the literate culture of the Puritans and the oral culture of Native Americans, Cohen (English, U. of Texas-Austin) looks at the methodological, disciplinary, legal, political, and aesthetic implications for studying communication during the early period of English colonies in North America. He looks at native audience, good noise from New England, forests of gestures, and multimedia combat and the Pequot War.

''For the past two decades Matt Cohen has been one of Canada''s premier writers of fiction, with an impressive list of critically acclaimed and award-winning novels and stories. Lives of the Mind Slaves- composed of eight stories and a novella, all but one of which were previously published - is an excellent sampler of his literary sophistication and craftsmanship. This obviously carefully selected collection, emphasizing the author''s conventional rather than experimental production, exhibits the finely tuned and engaging intelligence we have come to expect in Cohen''s fiction, an intelligence that relentlessly probes and exposes the depths of an urbanized, cosmopolitan, transcultural, and permanently uprooted individual who perceives the mind as his last refuge from life''s randomness, instability, and impermanence.''

Two love stories, one past, one present, mirror each other in this highly acclaimed story of ambition, sex, memory and marriage. Set in small-town Ontario -- vintage Matt Cohen territory -- Elizabeth and After is rich in insights about human foibles and aspirations, and an unforgettable portrait of a place and the people who live there.

Matt Cohen left us all a gift when he decided, in the last six months of his life, to write a memoir. Typing is an invaluable and touching reckoning of the writing life, funny in many places, brilliant in others. It''s also the story of the flourishing of writing in Canada: Cohen was at the centre of our country''s cultural life for over three decades. He was one of the founders of the Writers'' Union; he was the brains behind many initiatives, including the successful lobbying for the public lending right; he was a translator of Quebec writers into English. After his death, it became clear that Cohen was a touchstone for many writers and readers in this country, at the same time as he was a dedicated outsider, a Jewish intellectual moving through a WASPish cultural woods. Typing includes rare and wonderful portraits of George Grant, Hugh Garner, Morley Callaghan and Margaret Laurence, writers who came ahead of him and who posed their own puzzles of recognition and success. Cohen''s memoir is rich in recollection, from his early days at Rochdale writing hip, stream-of-consciousness novels to his move to a farm near Kingston, Ontario, where the southern Ontario landscape captured his imagination and inspired such novels as The Disinherited, The Sweet Second Summer of Kitty Malone and, years later, Elizabeth and After. Through the ebbs and flows of literary fashion and worldly acclaim, Cohen stayed constant to the demands of fiction. This memoir ends in the present tense. Cohen had a novel he wanted to finish, and he was certain he wouldn''t die before he was done. He wasn''t so lucky, but we, at least, have these last pages in which Matt Cohen''s voice is utterly alive.

The American ninteenth century witnessed a media explosion unprecedented in human history, and Walt Whitman''s poetry reveled in the potentials of his time: "See, the many-cylinder''d steam printing-press, " he wrote. "See, the electric telegraph, stretching across the Continent, from the Western Sea to Manhattan." Still, as the budding poet learned, books neither sell themselves nor move themselves: without an efficient set of connections to get books to readers, the democratic, media-saturated future that Whitman imagined would have remained warehoused. Whitman''s works sometimes ran through the "many-cylinder''d steam printing-press" and were carried in bulk on "the strong and quick locomotive." Yet during his career, his publications did not follow a progressive path toward mass production and distribution. Whitman''s Drift asks how the many options for distributing books and newspapers shaped the way writers wrote and readers read. Studying nineteenth-century literature and how it circulated can help us understand not just how to read Whitman''s works and times, but how to understand what is happening to our imaginations now, in the midst of the twenty-first century media explosion. -- from back cover.

First published in 1972, Columbus and the Fat Lady introduced readers to Governor General’s Literary Award–winning author Matt Cohen’s skewed and hilarious worldview. By turns funny, surreal, wistful, savagely satirical, and brilliantly inventive, the stories in this collection intrigue and surprise the reader with their unexpected language and plots. He conjures up images that are both absurd and perceptive. From Sir Galahad as a schoolteacher to Christopher Columbus as a carnival attraction, these stories feature the improbable with strength and virtuosity. This collection is a foray into the jungles of life on this planet and the tangled but fascinating interiors of the human head.

Last Seen, Matt Cohen’s penultimate novel, was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award and the Trillium Book Award. Last Seen is a darkly comic story of two brothers and a woman who brings them both back to life. Harold, the older brother, is handsome and charming but dying of cancer. Alex is bookish and a scholar in Europe. With Francine, a nurse they both once loved, Alec cares for Harold until he dies. One day, Alec goes into a bar full of Elvis impersonators and there meets Francine—and Harold. Why has Harold come back from the dead? In this fragmentary tale of obsessive grieving, Cohen mixes moments of wry humour with touching pathos. Last Seen demonstrates that it takes more than death to untie the knot between two brothers.

The Sweet Second Summer of Kitty Malone, first published in 1979, is one of Matt Cohen''s four novels that came to be known as the Salem quartet--stories set in the fictional town of Salem in eastern Ontario, somewhere north of Kingston in the rugged farmland and forest of the Canadian Shield. These are the novels that first brought Matt Cohen to national attention. The Sweet Second Summer of Kitty Malone, a story about the pleasure of love that comes late in life, centres on the lives of two time-worn characters whose pursuit of happiness is strangely rewarded. With The Disinherited, another of the Salem novels, this is considered among the author''s best works.

Paul Stevens is a bookseller in the marginalized world of used books, a lover of Flaubert and Dickens, young, unsure of himself - until he meets Judith and is drawn into her secret world.

With a clear-eyed affection for the wandering souls who populate his stories—as they cling to talismans like a cowboy shirt, a chenille bedspread and a 1953 classic Ford—Matt Cohen causes us to look at them, and the worlds they inhabit, in unexpected ways. In his darkly comic, wholly original manner, he moves and surprises us, makes us laugh, and reveals the many sides of his extraordinary imagination.

The Disinherited, first published in 1974, is one of Matt Cohen''s four novels that came to be known as the Salem quartet--stories set in the fictional town of Salem in eastern Ontario, somewhere north of Kingston in the rugged farmland and forest of the Canadian Shield. These are the novels that first brought Matt Cohen to national attention. As with his Governor General''s Award-winning novel, Elizabeth and After, The Disinherited is a novel of love and the land and their impact on a family dynasty, of the gradual encroachment of the modern-day city and its developers, and of the family''s struggle against the threat of disintegration.

Confronting the rifts created by our common conceptual vocabulary for North American colonial studies How can we tell colonial histories in ways that invite intercultural conversation within humanistic fields that are themselves products of colonial domination? Beginning with a famous episode of failed communication from the narrative of the freed slave Olaudah Equiano, The Silence of the Miskito Prince explores this question by looking critically at five concepts frequently used to imagine solutions to the challenges of cross-cultural communication: understanding, cosmopolitanism, piety, reciprocity, and patience. Focusing on the first two centuries of North American colonization, Matt Cohen traces how these five concepts of cross-cultural relations emerged from, and continue to evolve within, colonial dynamics. Through a series of revealing archival explorations, he argues the need for a new vocabulary for the analysis of past interactions drawn from the intellectual and spiritual domains of the colonized, and for a historiographical practice oriented less toward the illusion of complete understanding and scholarly authority and more toward the beliefs and experiences of descendant communities. The Silence of the Miskito Prince argues for new ways of framing scholarly conversations that use past interactions as a site for thinking about intercultural relations today. By investigating the colonial histories of these terms that were assumed to promote inclusion, Cohen offers both a reflection on how we got here and a model of scholarly humility that holds us to our better or worse pasts.