Moving Kings
By
Joshua Cohen
Read by
Jonathan Davis
Release:
07/11/2017
Runtime:
7h 14m
Unabridged
Quantity:
“This audiobook begins as though it will be a comedy but gets darker as it goes along. Narrator Jonathan Davis tracks that progression through a multiplicity of New York voices and accents—Israeli, Arabic, Manhattan, outer boroughs, Hispanic, and more. He manages to convey some especially thick accents, for people who speak little English, with complete clarity. There are passages in which the prose is of considerable emotional intensity, and Davis captures every bit of it. All the characters, even the most disreputable, come to life in their struggles to learn how and who to be in the world. Just don’t expect them to have happy endings. Winner of the AudioFile Earphones Award.”
AudioFile
Winner of an AudioFile Earphones Award
A propulsive, incendiary novel about faith, race, class, and what it means to have a home, from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Netanyahus
“A Jewish Sopranos . . . utterly engrossing, full of passionate sympathy . . . Cohen is an extraordinary prose stylist, surely one of the most prodigious at work in American fiction today.”—The New Yorker
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR—Vulture, Bookforum
One of the boldest voices of his generation, Joshua Cohen returns with Moving Kings, a powerful and provocative novel that interweaves, in profoundly intimate terms, the housing crisis in America’s poor black and Hispanic neighborhoods with the world's oldest conflict, in the Middle East.
The year is 2015, and twenty-one-year-olds Yoav and Uri, veterans of the last Gaza War, have just completed their compulsory military service in the Israel Defense Forces. In keeping with national tradition, they take a year off for rest, recovery, and travel. They come to New York City and begin working for Yoav’s distant cousin David King—a proud American patriot, Republican, and Jew, and the recently divorced proprietor of King’s Moving Inc., a heavyweight in the tri-state area’s moving and storage industries. Yoav and Uri now must struggle to become reacquainted with civilian life, but it’s not easy to move beyond their traumatic pasts when their days are spent kicking down doors as eviction-movers in the ungentrified corners of the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens, throwing out delinquent tenants and seizing their possessions. And what starts off as a profitable if eerily familiar job—an “Occupation”—quickly turns violent when they encounter one homeowner seeking revenge.
“A Jewish Sopranos . . . utterly engrossing, full of passionate sympathy . . . Cohen is an extraordinary prose stylist, surely one of the most prodigious at work in American fiction today.”—The New Yorker
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR—Vulture, Bookforum
One of the boldest voices of his generation, Joshua Cohen returns with Moving Kings, a powerful and provocative novel that interweaves, in profoundly intimate terms, the housing crisis in America’s poor black and Hispanic neighborhoods with the world's oldest conflict, in the Middle East.
The year is 2015, and twenty-one-year-olds Yoav and Uri, veterans of the last Gaza War, have just completed their compulsory military service in the Israel Defense Forces. In keeping with national tradition, they take a year off for rest, recovery, and travel. They come to New York City and begin working for Yoav’s distant cousin David King—a proud American patriot, Republican, and Jew, and the recently divorced proprietor of King’s Moving Inc., a heavyweight in the tri-state area’s moving and storage industries. Yoav and Uri now must struggle to become reacquainted with civilian life, but it’s not easy to move beyond their traumatic pasts when their days are spent kicking down doors as eviction-movers in the ungentrified corners of the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens, throwing out delinquent tenants and seizing their possessions. And what starts off as a profitable if eerily familiar job—an “Occupation”—quickly turns violent when they encounter one homeowner seeking revenge.
Release:
2017-07-11
Runtime:
7h 14m
Format:
audio
Weight:
0.0 lb
Language:
English
ISBN:
9781524779221
Publisher:
Penguin Random House
Praise