A Place to Read

Michael Cohen, A Place to Read: Life and Books (Brisbane: Interactive Publications, 2014).

MICHAEL COHEN'S ESSAYS on the reading life are a treat to read. Relaxed, personal, wide-ranging, they contain fascinating nuggets of information and lively assessments of hundreds of books, as well as a whole life’s worth of thoughtful rumination on time, love, travel, and family, as well as what it means to be, almost existentially, a reader. – Christina Thompson, Editor, Harvard Review 

Anyone who has pounded the pavement selling The Great Books of the Western World in 54 volumes and lived to tell gets my undying respect and should get yours. Michael Cohen is a book rat, not a book snob. For him, the pleasures of the book are tactile and auditory as well as psychological and philosophical. The essays in A Place to Read take on potential plate-lunch combinations in western Kentucky, the tuxedo as male uniform, the golf course as locus of friendship and humor, and Baptist theological responses to Day of the Dead practices in Michoacán, in addition to more strictly literary subjects.
– Ann Neelon, editor of New Madrid

Michael Cohen has given us a collection of personal retrospectives that deserve a place in the finest tradition of the American essay. Each is in its own way a comment on the human situation, filtered through a personal optic that is both refined and erudite.  Amusing, highly personal, insightful, they’ll make you smile, smirk, frown, and gasp, but they’ll never bore.  I promise.
– E. A. Allen, author of the Montclaire Mysteries

Sisters

Michael Cohen, Sisters: Relation and Rescue in Nineteenth-Century British Novels and Paintings (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1995).

Looking at nineteenth-century British paintings and novels, Sisters argues that the rescue of one sister by another, the subject of a surprising number of works, is a metaphor for the moral rehabilitation of one woman by others in defiance of damning stereotypical constructions of women in general.

Engaging English Art

Michael Cohen, Engaging English Art: Entering the Work in Two Centuries of English Painting and Poetry (University of Alabama Press, 1987).

Engaging English Art is about strategies common to poetry and painting for engaging readers and observers. Engagement is a word Cohen uses to identify the reader’s or observer’s experience of entering the work of art and being captured intellectually, emotionally, or morally by its subject. His examples come from English painting and poetry from about 1680 to 1880, because Cohen believes that engagement had preferred critical status as an artistic goal in England during this period, until the advent of aestheticism.

The Poem in Question

Michael Cohen and Robert Bourdette, The Poem in Question (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983).

Students first embarking on a study of poetry are often understandably baffled. What seems as if it ought to be a natural process of comprehension and enjoyment becomes one of intimidating difficulties. For such readers, The Poem in Question provides a practical method of inquiry for getting answers about the meaning of a poem. This approach to poetry begins by encouraging students to focus and refine their own questions about a poem by following them with the questions Who? When? Where? What? How? And Why?—questions that work as well for the reader of poetry as for the reporter, historian, or scientist.

Hamlet in My Mind's Eye

Michael Cohen, Hamlet in My Mind's Eye (University of Georgia Press, 1989).

Winner of the South Atlantic Modern Language Association book award.

Hamlet, Cohen suggests, is always in rehearsal for the reader. While the actor must give a character one voice, the reader can keep a number of interpretations of character in mind while moving through the play. The multiple readings in this book open the play up to reveal this manifold complexity, demonstrating how Hamlet may be read and performed in the mind’s eye—always its first and last theater.

Murder Most Fair

Michael Cohen, Murder Most Fair: The Appeal of Mystery Fiction (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press/Associated University Presses, 2000).

“Murder Most Fair is a valuable addition to critical debates on mystery fiction and on literary history itself…an informed, intellectually astute contribution to an exciting area of literary studies.” --Susan Rowland, The Modern Language Review 97:4 (2002), 928-9

“At a time when the trend of much academic criticism (of mystery fiction as well as all other literature) has been to de-center the text and to call into question the nature (or even the existence) of aesthetic value, Cohen’s work is likely to prompt lively discussion and disagreement. But it is, I believe, the freshest examination of mystery fiction to appear in some time, and it should be regarded as a major addition to the body of work in the field.” --John Teel, South Atlantic Review 66:2 (2001), 202-204.