Mirrors

Born in the Paris suburb of Asnières in 1939, Marcel Cohen lives in Paris where he makes his living, under a pseudonym, as a widely read journalist. In his own work, which includes poems, short stories and novels, he has concerned himself with honing his narrative line to the bare essentials, where a sequence of gestures, a brief dialogue, the revelation of a detail can attain their full implications and nuance, building into a sort of intimate drama that resonates with the concision of poetry.

These texts—like walls, like mirrors—tell of persecution, suffocation, and freedom in settings that range across his personal map: Paris under the occupation, Auschwitz, the Sinai desert, Benares, Kabul, New York, but also anonymous hotel rooms, his childhood home, lost roads in the country. In understated tones and a poetic instinct for details, Mirrors offers a portrait of a man coming to terms with the times in which we live.