A new novel by Joshua Cohen is coming in 2027.
Penguin Press will publish the author’s Dead Herzls next winter, the press announced in a news release. It calls the book “a virtuoso new novel” and “a haunting epic of decline and fall.”
Cohen made his publishing debut in 2005 with the story collection The Quorum, and released his first novel, Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto, in 2007. He went on to publish books including Four New Messages, Book of Numbers, and Moving Kings.
In 2021, New York Review Books published Cohen’s The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family. In a starred review, a critic for Kirkus called the book, which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, “A novel that is as enjoyable as it is intelligent: a truly brilliant book and a remarkable achievement.”
Dead Herzls, Penguin Press says, will be a fictionalized account of the three children and one grandchild of Theodor Herzl, the father of political Zionism; all his descendants died tragically.
“A classical tragedy and a poignant psychological study of how the familial becomes the political, it is Joshua Cohen’s most important novel to date,” says Penguin Press, “and a brilliantly dark prehistory of our violent present.”
Dead Herzls is scheduled for publication on Feb. 16, 2027.
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
