How to Live. What to Do, Josh Cohen
How to Live. What to Do, Josh Cohen
List: $20.00 | Sale: $14.00
Club: $10.00

How to Live. What to Do
In Search of Ourselves in Life and Literature

Author: Josh Cohen

Narrator: Josh D. Cohen

Unabridged: 9 hr 48 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 10/26/2021


Synopsis

A brilliant psychoanalyst and professor of literature invites us to contemplate profound questions about the human experience by focusing on some of the best-known characters in literature—from how Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway copes with the inexorability of midlife disappointment to Ruth's embodiment of adolescent rebellion in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go.

“So beautiful ... a fantastic book.” —Zadie Smith, best-selling author of White Teeth

In supple and elegant prose, and with all the expertise and insight of his dual professions, Josh Cohen explores a new way for us to understand ourselves. He helps us see what Lewis Carroll’s Alice and Harper Lee’s Scout Finch can teach us about childhood. He delineates the mysteries of education as depicted in Jane Eyre and as seen through the eyes of Sandy Stranger in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.

He discusses the need for adolescent rebellion as embodied in John Grimes in James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain and in Ruth in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. He makes clear what Goethe’s Young Werther and Sally Rooney’s Frances have—and don’t have—in common as they experience first love; how Middlemarch’s Dorothea Brooke deals with the vicissitudes of marriage. Vis-a-vis old age and death, Cohen considers what wisdom we may glean from John Ames in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead and from Don Fabrizio in Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard.

Featuring:

   • Alice—Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland / Through the Looking Glass
   • Scout Finch—Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
   • Jane Eyre—Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
   • John Grimes—James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain
   • Ruth—Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go
   • Vladimir Petrovitch—Ivan Turgenev, First Love
   • Frances—Sally Rooney, Conversations with Friends
   • Jay Gatsby—F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
   • Esther Greenwood—Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
   • Clarissa Dalloway—Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
   • And more!

Reviews

Goodreads review by Micah on June 21, 2022

In How to Live. What to Do, Josh Cohen brings to the table his fourteen years of experience as a practicing psychoanalyst, and his time teaching literary theory to bring us this delightful book. I found it witty, enlightening, and overall, quite enjoyable and what I would consider a "cozy" read. The......more

Goodreads review by Andrew on June 03, 2021

What is the similarity between psychoanalysis and great literature? The answer, according to Cohen who is a university professor and an analyst, is neither offer simple answers to complex questions. With books, you have the opportunity to see the world through the eyes of someone else, understand wh......more

Goodreads review by MANTĖ || mantes.istorijos on September 29, 2023

Aš esu iš tų žmonių, kurie iš tikrųjų atsakymų į visus „kaip gyventi“ ir „ką daryti“ ieško knygose, tad šios pavadinimas bei tema – grožinės literatūros lyginimas su psichoterapija – mane iš karto suintrigavo: čia man ir apie mane! O jos autorius – ne tik psichoanalitikas, bet ir literatūros profeso......more

Goodreads review by Ailin on October 22, 2023

Got so many book recs from this, thank you! (Do feel like I maybe should’ve read some of these before reading an analysis book of them, but alas - I actually kinda feel like some of the insight here will affect my reading for the better! ) Started reading this one in my lunch breaks and so was off to......more

Goodreads review by Mohammed on July 06, 2024

Fantastic!......more


Quotes

“So beautiful. I really enjoyed it. A fantastic book.”
Zadie Smith
 
“Successful fiction, like successful therapy, Cohen notes, ‘sets a mirror before us, in which we see not only the self we know but the self we don’t.’ Relatability gives way to a more transformative recognition: seeing ourselves as others see us, or seeing ourselves as others, as strangers-and therefore as people whose stories and scripts aren’t as fixed as we thought . . . By the end of this wonderful book, we have learned to read its title not as a prescription but as a set of questions.”
—The Times Literary Supplement

“Cohen makes the case for fiction as a crucial aid to introspection, suggesting that our ability to see ourselves in literary characters runs parallel to the all-important ability to see ourselves.”
LitHub’s “Most Anticipated Books of 2021 Part 2”

“Absorbing . . . Uniformly insightful. . . Compelling . . . An engrossing consideration of how reading fiction can lay a pathway for emotional and intellectual enrichment.”
Kirkus Reviews
 
“Original . . . Fascinating . . . The premise is a brilliant one with plenty of room for fun.”
Publishers Weekly