Drawn both from previously unanthologized published work and from the author's personal horde of typescripts from the 1960s to the 1980s, this collection of stories centers around philosophical themes: the awareness of existence and experience, of reality and truth, and the relativity of time and place.
Trying to Fool Death comprises verse and dialogues drawn from Marvin Cohen's almost daily emails to a group of friends. It focuses on Marvin's acute awareness of his mortality; on death and living, on memories, on friendship and lost friends. The pieces obsessively work and rework these themes, with a viewpoint varying from the joyous to the despairing, and from the stark to the absurd. "In Marvin Cohen one senses the metaphysical thirst, as he questions the notion of reality, as he distorts accepted relationships of time and death, as he approaches dark subjects with the good-natured humour reminiscent of Benjamin Péret, and particularly as he demonstrates his extraordinary power over words and word associations that break down the expected ones." - Anna Balakian, Surrealism: The Road to the Absolute
Marvin Cohen writes of Booboo Roi, his playfully anti-theatrical adaptation of Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi: "In the 1970s or 1980s I read Barbara Wright's Ubu translation, which inspired me with its sheer royal barbarity of being brutal and decisive to any opposition: pure powerful selfishness. I wrote this play as a compensation for being poor, more than half deaf, and growing up in Brooklyn with poor parents ... I envied my middle class contemporaries' privileges. I felt powerless and inferior to everyone. I had childishly daydreamed of having power over everyone, ruthlessly tyrannical, so I put myself in Ubu Roi's Booboo's shoes, and got imaginary literary revenge on the world."