Fitzcarraldo Editions has acquired Dead Herzls by Joshua Cohen, the American writer’s first novel since winning the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for The Netanyahus. Dead Herzls will be published on 11 February 2027, simultaneously with Penguin Press in the US.
Publisher Jacques Testard acquired UK and Commonwealth (excluding Canada) rights from Caspian Dennis at Abner Stein on behalf of Edward Orloff at McCormick Literary, on an exclusive submission, with Will Heyward acquiring NA rights for Penguin Press at auction. Dead Herzls will be Joshua Cohen’s fourth book with Fitzcarraldo Editions.
Theodor Herzl, novelist, journalist, playwright, and the father of political Zionism, was also the father to three children: Pauline, who died from her drug addictions; Hans, who converted to Christianity and committed suicide on the eve of his older sister’s funeral, and Trude, the youngest, who perished in a Nazi camp. Only one of these Herzls had a child: Trude’s son Stephen, a British Army captain who leapt to his death from a bridge in Atomic Age Washington DC, thus ending the Herzl line.
From the salons of imperial Vienna to the debauched cabarets of interwar Paris, from Blitzed-out London to the final days of the British Mandate in Jerusalem, Dead Herzls tells this nearly-unknown saga as a continent-and-century-spanning fiction written with millennial compression, compassion, grace, and even wit. A classical tragedy as well as a poignant psychological case study of how the familial becomes the political, it is Joshua Cohen’s most important novel to date, and a brilliantly dark prehistory of our violent present.
Jacques Testard said: ‘Dead Herzls is an extraordinary novel by one of the great English-language writers of our time. With The Netanyahus, he was already at the height of his powers, so we’ll have to invent a new publishing cliché for Dead Herzls because he has surpassed himself. It’s an exceptionally compelling and immersive family tragedy – I couldn’t put it down.’
Joshua Cohen said: ‘It’s an honour to do another book with Fitzcarraldo Editions, the one UK publishing house that still publishes as if the world were alive and young. I admire the press’s capacity for risk, and the high respect it has for its readers.’
Joshua Cohen was born in 1980 in Atlantic City. His books include the novels Moving Kings, Book of Numbers, Witz, A Heaven of Others and Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto; the short fiction collection Four New Messages; and the non-fiction collection Attention. Cohen has been called ‘a major American writer’ by the New York Times, and ‘an extraordinary prose stylist, surely one of the most prodigious at work in American fiction today’ by the New Yorker. He was named one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists in 2017 and awarded the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Netanyahus. He lives in New York City.