Kirjahaku

Plays on Words collects for the first time six satirical plays, five never before published, written in the early 1980s by American essayist, novelist, playwright, poet, humorist, and surrealist Marvin Cohen. Also included are two short theater-related pieces ("How He/She Dramatizes His/Her Life" and "A Complaint as a Theatre Goer"), an excerpt from a 1981 interview, and a new brief preface written by Cohen for this collection.

Nine recently discovered unpublished short serio-comedies from the 1960s and 1970s by essayist, novelist, playwright, poet, humorist, and surrealist Marvin Cohen, one of America's most innovative postmodern writers.

Five previously unpublished seriocomic novellas and short stories written in the mid-1960s by American postmodern writer Marvin Cohen: Harvy's Failure / The Spring That Never Saw Print / The Don Juan of East Eighty-Ninth Street / A Family Confusion / Guilt in Search of God

"Cohen is a superfan, and he has written an intellectual manual for his co-religionists. They know who they are and they will cherish this manual. But anyone who has spent a soft, green afternoon, his shirt open at the throat to the sun, the whistles and chatter of the infield drifting up to the edge of his mind, watching, absorbing, taking in a baseball game, will cherish it." -- From the introduction by Jim Bouton, former Major League pitcher and author of the 1970 controversial bestseller Ball Four. Originally published in 1974 as Baseball the Beautiful: Decoding the Diamond, this new paperback edition has been completely reformatted and contains the full text of the original version. According to the bio that Marvin Cohen, now 86, wrote for his website, the original publisher took the liberty of changing the book's now restored title "for commercial feasibility and to bring in the lumbering lowbrow audience." This new edition also contains a later essay that did not appear in the original, and the author has also written a new foreword.

NECESSARY ENDS involves two couples who tangle in a philosophical farce about love, language, sex, time, and death. A collaboration with the director James Milton, it was privately auditioned to producer Joseph Papp, with Wallace Shawn, Andre Gregory, Angela Pietropinto, and Gretchen Van Riper in the four roles. "The term 'character' was coined with Marvin Cohen in mind. A gentle observer of the unpredictable and slightly absurd, Marvin has a fondness for mankind that is unmistakably his own. Sometimes I think of him as a comedian-chronicler standing at the center, his head turned slightly toward your line of speaking to accomodate his hearing aid. NECESSARY ENDS is the sum of these parts, as Marvin positions and repositions people within relationships, that ever-aimed ear to the pun and odd bits of conversation, as though he's walking slowly through a cocktail party. The strength of his writing stems from his baroque sense of humor and his ability to see both the world and himself as wonderfully delightful miscreants."Joseph Papp, from his Introduction to Plays from the New York Shakespeare Festival

Poetry. When asked by a friend why he recently he had been writing only poetry, Marvin Cohen, octogenarian author of many novels, stories, essays and plays, quipped that he had "run out of prose." It would be as apt to say that, in these delightfully carefree rhymed homilies about the irreducible vagaries of life, death, and evolution, he has leapt off the ground, into the air.

Poetry. In this prodigious outpouring of short pieces, Marvin Cohen looks into every corner of human affairs, even the darkest, with a joyful spark that never goes out.

Marvin Cohen writes of Booboo Roi, his playfully anti-theatrical adaptation of Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi: "In the 1970s or 1980s I read Barbara Wright's Ubu translation, which inspired me with its sheer royal barbarity of being brutal and decisive to any opposition: pure powerful selfishness. I wrote this play as a compensation for being poor, more than half deaf, and growing up in Brooklyn with poor parents ... I envied my middle class contemporaries' privileges. I felt powerless and inferior to everyone. I had childishly daydreamed of having power over everyone, ruthlessly tyrannical, so I put myself in Ubu Roi's Booboo's shoes, and got imaginary literary revenge on the world."

Drawn both from previously unanthologized published work and from the author's personal horde of typescripts from the 1960s to the 1980s, this collection of stories centers around philosophical themes: the awareness of existence and experience, of reality and truth, and the relativity of time and place.