Last year I reviewed his most recent (I think it’s the most recent one) book Witz.
http://www.outsideleft.com/always.php?catID=70&updateID=1257
though I’m still not sure I’ve worked out the meta from the metaphor from the actual text from the sacred texts from the blasphemy from just simply the blast of his writing. I love an art so big that I’m not sure if I love it or not afterwards.

On top of all the dense, intellectualized pyrotechnics, Cohen is a lyrical badass. This sentence from his story “Emission” in the Paris Review 196 is so beautiful; it’s like watching trapeze artists practice or a garden of flowers blooming at once:

Left the leafy lindens and sluggish Spree, the breakfast of sausages and cheeses and breads that stretched like communist boulevards into late afternoon, the stretch-denim legs of the artist girls pedaling home from their studios on paint-splattered single-speeds, the syrupy strong coffees the Kurdish diaspora made by midnight at my corner café and its resident narcoleptic who’d roll tomorrow’s cigarettes for me, ten smokes for two euros.

Thanks for the review!