“Because I dream of purity,” states Joshua Cohen, when asked why he favors metafiction throughout his oeuvre, and tests the mode’s limits in his next novel, Bewildernus. After gifting HENRY a reading from this work-in-progress in his downtown home, Josh participated in an interview, this Q&A, throughout which his candor emphasized the power of unmediated communication—the pure conveyance of experience and ideas—and reaffirmed for the whole HENRY team why we devote our mornings, nights, and weekends to this project.
It’s thematically fitting that HENRY made Josh’s acquaintance online. Throughout his novels and stories Josh examines the Internet as an omniscient, omnipresent force surrogating the divine. He also speaks to the indelibility of our footprints on the Web, which complicate escape and reinvention. A hyper-perceptive cultural critic, Josh discusses these, among a host of other issues, today on HENRY.
Josh reads from the opening chapter of Bewildernus here on HENRY.
Edited by Justin Gonçalves; Cinematography: Daphne Denis; Music: “Ethnopoetics” by Face of Man
