Amateur Barbarians

Robert Cohen (born 1957) is an American novelist and short fiction writer whose themes center around contemporary identity and transcendence. He is the author of novels including The Organ Builder (1988), The Here and Now (1996, winner of the Ribalow Prize), Inspired Sleep (2001), and Amateur Barbarians (2009), as well as the story collection The Varieties of Romantic Experience (2002); he has received a Whiting Writers' Award, Guggenheim Fellowship, Pushcart Prize, and other honors. Cohen has taught creative writing at Harvard, Iowa Writers' Workshop, Rice University, and Middlebury College, where he is currently a professor of English and American Literatures.