Because we shouldn't believe in nations, because we have forsaken our traditions or our traditions have forsaken us, because only individuals matter to those who happen to be one ... because everyone has their own voice and we're all speaking at once, connected through a disconnect and yet still insisting on our fundamental differences, that we're special, marked by virtue of our sheer existence ... Because of all these paradoxes — screaming into each other through any ear and enacting a love-death in the gray middle — how can we truly expect to listen when we want only to be heard? But what is there to say that hasn't already been ignored? — these are some of the ideas that this book does not address.
Joshua Cohen has performed in-depth investigations into mirrors and navels to return with
The Quorum
, his first collection of short fiction. A set of ten stories, a set of dreams, and a long monologue, these are all first-person rants given over by the somehow alienated, individuals seeking only a sympathetic hearing, all dealing with identity and religion as well as occupied with technical ideas of reliable narration and the structure of the mind's ear. From a review of a book about the Holocaust that's six-million blank pages to a suicide note from a young university student, from a letter to home outlining an economy based on hair to a eulogy for a poem, from a story narrated by three-hundred concubines to the title story about a group of people who interchange appearances, habits, proclivities and talents,
is a sensitive and inevitably absurd take on the individual's lifelong quest to get someone, anyone, to listen.