Fiction. Born in the Paris suburb of Asnieres in 1939, Marcel Cohen lives in Paris where he makes his living, under a pseudonym, as a widely read journalist. In his own work, which includes poems, short stories and novels, he has concerned himself with honing his narrative line to the bare essentials, where a sequence of gestures, a brief dialogue, the revelation of a detail can attain their full implications and nuance, building into a sort of intimate drama that resonates with the concision of poetry. These texts - like walls, like mirrors - tell of persecution, suffocation, and freedom in settings that range across his personal map: Paris under the occupation, Auschwitz, the Sinai desert, Benares, Kabul, New York, but also anonymous hotel rooms, his childhood home, lost roads in the country. In understated tones and a poetic instinct for details, MIRRORS offers a portrait of a man coming to terms with the times in which we live.

Author City: Paris FRA

Marcel Cohen was born in 1937 in Asnieres and currently lives in Paris. He has traveled and worked a journalist in the Hamalayas, Assam, and the Middle East, Latin America, and the United States. His work translated into English includes WALLS (ANAMNESES) (Black Square Editions/The Brooklyn Rail, 2009), IN SEARCH OF A LOST LADINO (IBIS Editions, 2005), MIRRORS (Green Integer, 1998), and THE PEACOCK EMPEROR MOTH (Burning Deck, 1995). He has written on the work of Antonio Saura as well as other artists, and his volume of interviews with Edmond Jabes, FROM THE DESERT TO THE BOOK, was published by Barrytown/Station Hill Press in 1990. Cohen's work has been translated into Greek, Norwegian, Danish, Hebrew, Spanish, and English.