In his new collection of stories, Four New Messages (Graywolf, 208 pages), Joshua Cohen portrays lives that are predicated on and destroyed by the Internet’s world of screens and static. Portaging an understanding of his generation’s ethos (the author is 31), Cohen fleshes out young characters struggling with an increasingly electronic lifestyle. Cohen’s stories, which range from about 30 to 70 pages in length, take some time to get into, but settling into them is something to be relished. His sentences, spare of commas and loaded with improvised structure and vocabulary, have a frenetic yet hypnotic quality. Through layers of […]