AMATEUR BARBARIANS-A Giveaway

GIVEAWAY ENDED!
AMATEUR BARBARIANS
by ROBERT COHEN

ABOUT THE BOOK:

With the bills piling up and the spectre of layoffs at work, graduate school has never been more appealing. Chuck all the grown-up decisions and compromises and burrow into distant, interior landscapes too remote for questions about gas prices and 401K plans. Answer just the questions you choose to hear, without having to commute. Maybe, though, the grad student spending the better part of his day in the coffee shop is fantasizing about stealing off with the harried suburbanite's minivan, watching the latest procedural crime drama on TV, packing the kids' lunches and setting the alarm to do it all again the same way the next day.

This is the "Freaky Friday" premise of Robert Cohen's new novel, "Amateur Barbarians." Instead of parental and teenage angst, Cohen gives two middle-aged men glimpses of the lives they each had long avoided. Teddy Hastings is the principal of a New England middle school. A brother's death and a health scare send him headlong into a series of tragicomic downfalls that break every one of his routines.

Most men might find a new outlook after a holiday weekend in jail because of a photography class assignment gone awry, but Teddy finds himself still on a treadmill. Literally, he's running on a treadmill in his basement, and figuratively, he's not making any headway in his search for transcendence. It turns out that asking, "Is this all there is?" while running on treadmill doesn't lead anywhere. Perpetual grad student Oren Pierce has spent a lot of time pondering such big questions.

When all that thinking and indecision bore him, he makes what seems like the most radical leap: Accepting a teaching job at Teddy's school. Teddy's wobbling propels Oren to interim vice principal, and the former student is surprised to find he likes the imposition of order on his days. Oren's ascent from prolonged adolescence to humbled adulthood takes him from an empty apartment to puttering around a colleague's vacant house, then into a relationship with Teddy's wife. Teddy remains unaware that Oren is playing dress-up with his life, as his increasingly impulsive behaviour sends him on a hasty trip to Africa.

His terror at missing out on something big in life is lightened with Cohen's humour. This is a mid-life crisis comedy without the cliche of a sports car and a coed girlfriend. It's more like a video of two spastic gerbils, one flailing as he tries to jump off his wheel while the other one raises a tentative paw to give that same wheel a spin. Cohen's pacing repeatedly drops in on Teddy and Oren mid-dilemma. The men ask "how did I get here?" but not at the end of their respective journeys. The question comes in a coach airline seat, at a stop light - somewhere between here and there, revealing in fits and stutters the way we make the big decisions. There's less planning and more dodging than sometimes we like to acknowledge.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: ROBERT COHEN

Robert Cohen is the author of three novels, The Organ Builder, The Here and Now, and Inspired Sleep. His work has been awarded a Whiting Writers' Award, a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers Award, The Ribalow Prize, and a Pushcart Prize, and has appeared in a wide variety of publications, including Harpers, GQ, The Paris Review, The Atlantic Monthly Unbound, and Ploughshares. He teaches at Middlebury College in Vermont.

GIVEAWAY

THANKS TO LAUREN AND SIMON & SCHUSTER
FOR SPONSORING THIS GIVEAWAY OF
AMATEUR BARBARIANS
BY ROBERT COHEN

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