He’s filled with just enough venom to want to understand our culture and to criticize it with bruising eloquence ... any attempt at drawing a summary line around its variousness, its frightening range of ideas, or its abundance of voices would be like rounding up a pack of clever raccoons with a shoelace ... This is a collection that’s destined, if not designed, to defeat book reviews. There are too many Joshua Cohens ... Mr. Cohen’s overglutted collection can be exasperating, but it’s still cause for celebration and close study. He is experimenting with the essay form much more, and more cleverly, than any major American writer today ... Mr. Cohen also has a novelist’s knack for slipping in out and of tongues, acrolects and argots—amphetamine-fueled, neuroscientific, Heideggerian, Hebraic, pleonastic, demotic. Overmastering imitation, more than parody, is a keystone of his criticism.

A little pruning would have helped. The only point of opening an essay collection is to spend some time with an interesting mind, and Joshua Cohen—novelist, journalist, critic; prodigy, polyglot, polymath—has one of the most interesting minds in circulation. But half as long would have been twice as good ... The diary entries, sprinkled throughout, are pungent morsels of observation. But sustained ideas are harder to come by. Cohen is a drive-by intellectual who moves too fast to question his conjectures—if it occurs to him, it must be true—a verbal prestidigitator who’s inclined to let his language do the thinking for him ... Cohen is most at home, and Attention is at its best, in 'Abroad.' The section is heavy on literary criticism, the mode in which he goes deepest, because he goes slowest, and in which he is able to bring his learning, as well as his artistic experience, most fully to bear. There are actual arguments here, often brilliant ones ... His solipsistic immaturity can sometimes bother me, but his truculent bravery often delights me.

If curiosity is a writer’s greatest innate gift, Joshua Cohen may be America’s greatest living writer. Or maybe just the most focused. His first collection of non-fiction...is dazzling in its scope, but, oh the irony, it’s also very hard to get through ... what you have is a hodgepodge of writing that makes your head spin ... Digested in very small doses—an essay per night before bed, say, or a short one on the john—it will still take you weeks to reach the end of this book. And when you get there, you’ll probably have forgotten how Hrabal redeemed Socialist Realism. Still, writing like this does deserve some praise. Cohen truly commits to his subjects, dropping knowledge and literary criticism all over the place ... The whole book is like that, filled with topics that will be foreign to most readers, forcing them to really engage if they want to comprehend any of it ... you’ll find essays here to love ... You’ll just have to work at it.

At least Cohen is a phenomenal thinker whatever the theme whatever the subject: granular, acrobatic, startling ... Although Cohen here flaunts a next-level virtuosity across countless fields of expertise, the more memorable pieces are also the most straightforward in form. The journalistic long reads are first-rate ... His thinkpieces on American politics are whip-sharp ... he also has an amiable sideline in fanboy riffs on legends such as Aretha Franklin and John Zorn ... There are some jejune attempts at philosophical aperçu ... It is ironic that the whirligig of subjects here...risks driving the reader to distraction. Upon rejoining his theme, however, Cohen tackles the meta-problem of attention with the fervor of a man who knows the solution. Insisting that 'uniquely among the mental maladies, distraction can be reversed,' he veers towards Buddhist practice as a technique for marshalling attention ... Cohen’s diagnosis that fragmented attention is linked to our sociopolitical malaise rings true, but his own narrative evinces the difficulty of dispensing a remedy. Given Cohen is such a cliche-phobic stylist, it is regrettable that one of the hoariest of old saws springs to mind: Physician, heal thyself.

The pieces are often as off-kilter and thought-provoking as his novels and cover a dizzying array of topics, including politics, history, music, literature, and Jewish identity, sometimes all in one essay ... Paradoxically or, perhaps, to prove its point, the book’s central premise may be lost on readers who find the sprawling collection too challenging to keep them interested. But fans of David Foster Wallace and William T. Vollmann will revel in Cohen’s playful erudition, versatility, and dark humor.

Throughout the collection, Cohen displays impressive range. He’s equally comfortable discussing philosophy, politics, German metaphysics, Anna Kavan, Georges Perec, Mario Vargas Llosa, the internet, and Google—not to mention creating an abecedarium honoring Paris’ rogue English-language publisher Obelisk. Jewishness, so prevalent in Cohen’s fiction, is generously represented here as well. Sometimes overly stylistically pyrotechnic, the author refuses to wear his learning lightly, which occasionally stifles and snuffs out the good stuff. Some readers will find Cohen’s writing too disparate and snarky, but for those comfortable with the Vollmann/Gass/Eggers school of writing, these essays are the cat’s meow.

Though the opening essay—a lament on the shallow state of societal discourse in a world crowded with distractions—is a bit stale, Cohen picks up steam ... Cohen can be pretentious or obtuse, particularly in the random diary entries sprinkled throughout ... At its best, Cohen’s work evokes comparisons to Gore Vidal in tone and purview, but the author lacks consistency.