On June 25, at 6:30 p.m., FLAD will host the American writer Joshua Cohen, author of The Netanyahus (The Netanyahu Family, published in Portugal by Dom Quixote), which won the Pulitzer Prize for the best fiction book in 2022, for another edition of Meet the Author – Encounters with American Writers. This initiative is a partnership with the newspaper PÚBLICO.

Born in New Jersey in 1980, Joshua Cohen grew up in Atlantic City and Brooklyn. He graduated from the Manhattan School of Music with a degree in music composition in 2001, and then moved to Eastern Europe, where he lived and worked as a journalist for five years. Joshua Cohen has taught at Columbia University and translates works from German and Hebrew into English.

From an early age, his work attracted attention. Witz (2010) was named the best book of 2010 by The Village Voice. Four New Messages (2012) was considered one of the best books of 2012 by The New Yorker magazine. In 2017, he was named by Granta as one of the best young American writers of the decade.

Literary glory would come in 2022, when his most recent work The Netanyahus (published by Don Quixote in 2022), wins the Pulitzer Prize for best work of fiction.

The Netanyahus presents itself just as brilliantly as it unfolds, as “the account of a minor and ultimately even insignificant episode in the history of a very famous family.” The episode is the fictional visit of Benzion Netanyahu, father of the current Israeli prime minister, to Corbin College (fiction), for a job interview with Ruben Blum, a Jewish historian – but not a historian of Jews – who is in charge of the committee that will analyze the candidacy of Benzion, an exiled Israeli academic, specializing in the Inquisition of the Iberian Peninsula.

When Benzion Netanyahu — the father of Benjamin Netanyahu, who would become Israel’s prime minister — shows up for an interview with his wife and three children, Blum reluctantly welcomes guests into his home whose behavior calls into question his American way of life.

The work is a merry-go-round of emotions and themes, in a meandering dance between fiction and reality, humor and sarcasm, ranging from the historical account of a journey that took place, with episodes created to explore the ambiguities of the Jewish-American experience, the paradoxes of the diaspora, Judaism and identity politics, all concentrated in an unbridled, irreverent, by a linguistically excellent author.

Meet the Author is an initiative of FLAD, in partnership with PÚBLICO newspaper. The goal is to provide Portuguese readers with closer contact with some of the most respected writers in the USA. The sessions take place monthly and are open to the general public, free of charge. The guest authors are interviewed by journalist Isabel Lucas.

The conversation with Joshua Cohen will take place on June 25, at 6:30 pm, at the FLAD Auditorium, at Rua do Sacramento à Lapa, 21, in Lisbon.

The session is open to the public and admission is free. If you want to attend, confirm your presence through this link.

If you need further clarification, please email us at eventos.cultura@flad.pt