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The Varieties of Romantic Experience: Stories by [Robert Cohen]

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Robert Cohen

The Varieties of Romantic Experience: Stories Kindle Edition

by Robert Cohen (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

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For years Robert Cohen has been praised by reviewers and readers alike for his masterful prose and his exuberant and penetrating comic vision. The New York Times has even called his writing redemptive -- so satisfying as to "remind readers why they continue to cast their lines into the shrinking lake of contemporary fiction...his prose is not merely gorgeous, it's also terrifically funny; his humor is the ghastly variety embedded in everyday life."
Now, the critically acclaimed and bestselling author of Inspired Sleep delivers a collection of ten dazzling stories that not only show off Cohen's exhilarating prose and startling ironic humor but also provide a platform for his virtuoso range of tone and style and his ongoing investigation of the hazy, bedraggled American sensibility.
In "Oscillations," a man verbally paralyzed by his obsession with language retreats to a special institute, where he will relearn the art of communication. "Points of Interest" is an ingenious and timely exploration of the boundaries between life and art, as told through the revolving -- and dizzyingly revealing -- perspectives of its three self-absorbed protagonists. The title story features a hilariously out-of-touch psychology professor whose introductory lecture becomes an inadvertent confession of his own long, disastrous career of sexual mistakes. And in the more somber, moving "The Boys at Night," a suburban teenager, on the fringes of a family crisis, makes his first tentative forays into maturity, discovering how accidents at once reveal, imperil, and sustain us.
In each of these stories, the characters must wrestle with the slippery, invisible curtain between the world and their own fevered misapprehensions of it. What results is the urgently serious comedy we call Romanticism -- the yearning of the mind for contact with the actual, which is always receding from view. That these characters' desires and anxieties are familiar to us is the second thing we realize upon reading these stories. The first is how much we're laughing.

Length: 224 pages	Word Wise: Enabled	Enhanced Typesetting: Enabled
Page Flip: Enabled	Language: English

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San Francisco Chronicle Cohen reveals the perilous depths hidden beneath ordinary life, the sudden yearnings that move us...and he accomplishes this with brilliance, precision, and humor. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

About the Author

Robert Cohen is the author of three previous novels, The Organ Builder, The Here and Now, and Inspired Sleep, and a collection of short stories. Winner of a Lila Atcheston Wallace -Reader's Digest Writers Award, the Ribalow Prize, The Pushcart Prize, and a Whiting Award, he has published short fiction in a variety of publications -- including Harpers, GQ, The Paris Review and Ploughshares. He has taught at the Iowa Writers Workshop, Harvard University, and Middlebury College. He lives in Vermont. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

ASIN : B000FC0W7E
Publisher : Scribner (25 March 2002)
Language : English
File size : 426 KB
Text-to-Speech : Enabled
Screen Reader : Supported
Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
X-Ray : Not Enabled
Word Wise : Enabled
Print length : 224 pages

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Joseph Landes

Amazing Set of Short Stories

Reviewed in the United States on 30 May 2014

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I picked up this collection of short stories after seeing it on an older NY Times Notable Books list. I am super glad I did as although few people have heard of it and it was not reviewed broadly, the stories were each excellent and I highly recommend it to readers of this genre.

The title story is one of the best short stories I have read in a while. It is told by a college professor who is lecturing to his class in probably the most inappropriate way one can imagine. He is "lecturing" about his affair with his teaching assistant--delving deep into the sordid details of their interactions with each other. To be honest, I couldn't believe I was reading this let alone imagining one of my college professors ever giving a course like this. Staying with the teaching them, Cohen writes a story about another professor who invites his writing mentor to come lecture in his small town. The trip goes from bad to worse as the lecture is cancelled and he ends up at his mentee's house. In what I thought was the best and most touching story of all, "The Boys' at Night" talks about a family which starts out as sort of dysfunctional and then takes a turn for what seems to be the worse when the mom gives birth to a baby with Down's Syndrome. A difficult situation for any family becomes even more difficult for this family and we read about how this impacted the relationship between their two other sons and their parents.

Cohen is a tremendous writer. The stories each are interesting, punchy, and easy to read. I highly recommend this collection of short stories to all readers.

eregelma

Disappointing purchase of a paperbac

Reviewed in the United States on 13 January 2012

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This "purchase" was handled very poorly by the vendor. First, the wrong book was shipped. Then, after confirmation of the ISBN, I was asked to return the incorrect item (at my cost) after which the correct book would be shipped. I was reassured that I would be reimbursed for this additional cost as well. After several weeks, I received an email from Amazon, informing me that I was getting a credit for the initial purchase price, including the initial cost of shipping. However, there was no mention of reimbursement for the additional shipping (return of the incorrect item). Also, there was no explanation as to why the vendor did not follow up by shipping the originally-ordered item.

Overall, an extremely disappointing experience with this vendor.

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