The Monday Rhetoric of the Love Club, & Other Parables

“Marvin Cohen’s wacky humor,” the late Thomas Merton once said, “has something of ’Thurber, something of Steinberg, Buster Keaton, the surrealists, the French pataphysicians.” And this in itself is a fair enough assessment, to say the very least, of The Monday Rhetoric of the Love Club, a collection of twenty-one of the prolific Cohen’s parables, prose poems, fables, and dialogues. Two of the pieces, including the title story, originally appeared in the New Directions in Prose and Poetry series; most of the others were selected from the many other magazines and anthologies in England and the United States in which Cohen’s shorter works have been published.