Buy This Book Immediately!

My new book, ONLY WHAT IS, is now available! It's a collection of my 89 best posts — mostly fiction, with some personal essays and even some haiku — from the first year of this blog.

You can buy ONLY WHAT IS from Amazon, Barnes & Noble online, Booksamillion online, and from the publisher, iUniverse. You can also buy a signed copy directly from me at the cover price ($13.95) plus my shipping costs (approximately $4 in the US, depending on shipping method). See the info and the permanent links near the top of my sidebar (that way ---->).

To further entice you, here's some of the front and back matter from the book.

The jacket copy -- written by your intrepid author himself:

A man falls in love with a woman who exists only in his dreams.

A young couple walks the same street day after day, the husband always talking and the wife – doing what?

An artist sits sketching in the cemetery of a mental hospital, and wishes he’ll someday be buried there.

A hopeful businessman opens a shop in a location that is doomed.

A vampire craves, not his victims’ blood, but their personalities.

Eighty–nine blog posts, the best of the author’s first year in the blogosphere.

Eighty–nine glimpses of life imagined, experienced, felt, cherished, and above all, clearly seen. Here are stories of people yearning for companionship, parables of the unwittingly enlightened and the unknowingly benighted, landscapes of desolate beauty, moments of everyday tenderness and of sudden comic recognition, transcending the line between fiction and nonfiction.

As up–to–date as the blogosphere, yet reaching back for its roots to ancient Taoist tales and medieval Japanese pillow books.

Another step forward in the evolution of “a spectacular writer, a distinctive voice to be heard” (The Detroit News).

The review quotes:

About Richard Lawrence Cohen’s fiction:

Domestic Tranquility:

“It is a beautiful first novel — built on observations so minutely and constantly intelligent that one feels as intellectually engaged by it as emotionally seized.”
The New York Times Book Review

“A devastatingly convincing anatomy of a family.… Cohen reaches deeply into the hearts of his three characters, illuminating with clarity the foibles, flaws, dark sides, and resilience of us all.”
Best Sellers

“A deliberative, painstaking, yet warmly empathic first novel which explores the artifices of domestic tranquility and the fearful isolation, hostility, and anguished love beneath.”
Kirkus Reviews

“He writes about loving and caring and hurting with wisdom and wit.… Cohen’s book is a tragicomedy with a message of hope, not despair.”
The Fort Worth Star-Telegram

“Cohen is a skillful writer, as well as audacious.… The book is intense, frequently sad, sometimes sexual, and disturbingly accurate.”
Rocky Mountain News

“A masterpiece. The book is an original and knowing tribute to family life.… He grasps the power of daily experience and perceives the value of all emotions, from love to hate, panic to freedom, and humiliation to respect. Cohen showers the reader with penetrating insights.”
Church and Self


Say You Want Me:

“A poignantly imagined, perfectly realized novel of two–career family life in the 1980s.… The book explodes in beauty and pain when things that must change mix and ignite with the things that can’t.… I started reading it one night and read it straight through until 4 a.m.”
Jack Miles, The Los Angeles Times

“Out of a quiet story about ordinary people, Cohen has created a haunting and beautifully written novel.… Cohen sidesteps sentimentality in discussing a devoted father’s intricate relationship with his young son, and there is a rare clarity and energy to his prose. His ear for dialogue is superb.… The story is powerful and sad, the writing exhilarating.”
Publishers Weekly

“Cohen is a writer as intuitive as he is stylish.… Cohen also has an uncanny ear for the ways in which men and women try, with varying degrees of success, to talk to one another.”
Chicago Tribune Books

“A dazzling new novel.… Couldn’t be more up–to–the–moment.”
New Woman

“An absolutely gorgeous and haunting novel.… What is amazing about Richard Cohen’s handling of a marriage on the downslide, a new love affair, and the complexities of parenthood is that his voice always rings true, without fail.… He’s a spectacular writer, a distinctive voice to be heard.”
The Detroit News


Pronoun Music:

“Richard Cohen’s wonderful collection is flawless: full of strong, beautifully built and felt stories.”
Lorrie Moore, author of Birds of America

“With this book of stories Richard Cohen has reached into life deeply, wisely, and — for us readers — pleasurably. He is working with relationships that are the most difficult and touching: grown children with their aging parents or aunts or uncles, parents or step–parents with teenagers. I was entertained, instructed (and I come from a huge family), and frequently profoundly moved.”
John Casey, National Book Award-winning author of Spartina

“Marvelous stories, memorable and deeply moving and sometimes mercilessly funny! Richard Cohen’s characters inhabit the world fully, enlarging our awareness of reality. This is fiction we need to read now.”
Kelly Cherry, author of My Life and Dr. Joyce Brothers

“With wit and insight the twelve stories in Richard Cohen’s first short fiction collection explore family dynamics, childhood angst, and the inevitable, lifelong conflicts between parent and child.… Cohen provides memorable portraits of childhood, while indicating that child/parent relationships remain basically the same, even as the parties drift into middle and old age.”
Publishers Weekly

And most importantly, the photo:

So what are you waiting for? The very latest in ordering technology lies at your fingertips, and our fulltime staff of trained email recipients is eager to serve you.

Oh, one more thing, blogfriends: the book is dedicated to you.

UPDATE: Broken links on the sidebar have been fixed. Let me know if you ever have trouble reaching them.