Before Revelations, I published two books in Europe plus stories, articles, poetry, and essays in journals and magazines in the United States, Canada, China, Germany, England, and Greece. Another novel, The Viper's Son, an action-adventure book, is also out. I've been a professor in Georgia, where my son, Rob, still lives, a jazz musician, bookbinder, actor and,for almost two decades, a humorous commentator on public radio. Some years ago, I appeared in a mini-series for public television and co-starred in a feature film, Do Not Disturb, filmed in northern China, where I lived for a year. It was forty below zero many winter mornings. Currently I reside in southwest Florida with my nearly-perfect family. Revelations is funny serious, and I've used a lot of Greek and Native American mythology to create Abis. In many ways Revelations is about how to come back from personal tragedy, how to re-integrate body and mind, but mostly it's a fun read.
Thanks, Sandy
My critical and creative work has been praised over the years by Norman Mailer, Bernard Malamud, Patrick White and Isaac Beshevis Singer.
Here's a bit more information on REVELATIONS. If you read it, please leave a review. Thanks again.
Travel along with Manny Markovitz and his guide, Abis -- part Native American, part madman -- as they take you on a wild, always funny, sometimes poignant journey from the wilds of Greece to the bogs and barrier islands of south Georgia, USA in search for Abis's boss, Willy Love. Enter with them into a world of imagination, wild adventure and absolute delight as Manny wakens back to life and love after a great personal tragedy. Perhaps you will, too. Critic Erwin Ford calls Revelations "a Candide for the 21st century."
PRAISE FOR SANDY COHEN AND REVELATIONS: "I love it! And I'm jealous. . . you're quite a writer. Such pure, unadorned dialect; good strong story. Your characters live." -- Janice Daugharty, author of Earl in the Yellow Shirt (nominated for the Pulitzer Prize) "Moving . . . powerful. . . ." -- Elizabeth S. Morgan "A fine prose-poem." -Wayne Brown, author of On the Coast (winner of the Commonwealth Prize)
and here's a recent newspaper iterview:
Back to Albany - Home
Updated: 11:39 PM Jun 17, 2011
Cohen finds every day full of ‘Revelations’
June 18, 2011
Sandy Cohen, a professor of English at Albany State University for 34 years before he retired and moved to North Port, Fla., has had two books published in the past few months. Both were at least 25 years in the making. - Jim Hendricks, editor
Posted: 12:00 AM Jun 18, 2011
Reporter: Jim Hendricks, editor
Email Address: jim.hendricks@albanyherald.com
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Retired professor Sandy Cohen’s latest book is “Revelations.”
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Sandy Cohen, a professor of English at Albany State University for 34 years before he retired and moved to North Port, Fla., has had two books published in the past few months. Both were at least 25 years in the making.
Cohen’s books, “Revelations” (which I’ve read) and “The Viper’s Son” (on my list of things to read), were accepted by publishing houses last fall within a week of each other. Both stories were started in the early 1980s when Cohen and I were members of an informal writers’ club that met weekly in Albany.
In addition to his work at ASU, Cohen spent a year living in China, where he helped make a movie. “I was a co-star in a movie and (as payment) got a free haircut out of it,” he said. “There were two music numbers in it, and I was compared to John Travolta by the Chinese press. ... They said, ‘This guy is no John Travolta.’ ”
Cohen also is familiar to many Georgia Public Radio listeners for his humorous commentaries that the network carried before he moved to Florida seven years ago. In the 1970s, he produced a mini-series for PBS. And in his spare time, he is a bookbinder.
“Revelations” is a story of coping with a life-changing tragedy — the death of a spouse. A career-driven Georgia college professor, Manny Markovitz, goes on a trip to Greece with other tourists. There, the grief- and guilt-stricken Manny stumbles upon a Native American, Abis, a manic instigator who latches onto him, nicknames him Manny-Man and urges him to meet William Love, a wealthy, enigmatic and elusive figure who Abis assures Markovitz has all of the answers he is seeking.
Along the way, Markovitz, Abis and Abis’s dog Chufee run headfirst into perils of nature and of their own making while Markovitz engages in his quest to find Love, the meaning of his life and peace.
Cohen, his trademark dry humor intact, spoke with me late Friday morning in a telephone interview from his Florida home, which he shares with his “nearly perfect family” — his wife, Louise; their three children, and two dogs. His son, Rob, still resides in Georgia.
JIM: Get you at a bad time? I know how you South Florida guys are. I was afraid it might be nap time.
SANDY: You know, it’s not so much the South Florida as it is the age that creates the nap time. No, I put off kayak fishing just for this.
JIM: I remember you doing a good bit of bookbinding. You still doing that?
SANDY: Yes, I got a room in the back of the house and I actually have a lock on it where I can keep the kids, the dogs and everyone else out of it.
JIM: Let’s talk a little bit about “Revelations.” This is one, I guess, where the genesis was way back when we were doing the book club stuff.
SANDY: Yes, it is. Of course, it’s been revised over the years and it’s gotten really good reviews so far — which shocks me.
JIM: For me, the character that kind of took off was Abis.
SANDY: He’s based on a kind of a trickster god. And he’s based on a lot of Creek Indian mythology, as well as Greek mythology.
JIM: I’ll tell you, the one (character) that came to my mind first on it was Loki. He reminded me of Loki.
SANDY: Sure. Certainly. That’s him. You know, I think every religion that has more than one god in it has to have one trickster god. They’re the best explanation for things that happen. The gods have got to be kidding. I guess the only “real” character (in “Revelations”) was the dog, based on my late Jack Russell terrier, who was smarter than I was.
JIM: They tend to be smart.
SANDY: She went blind, but she could still sit up, roll over, do taxes — she was terrific. She wouldn’t itemize, I gotta say. Bad dog! Do that 1040!
JIM: So now when the IRS people read this, they’re probably going to be doing some back checks on you.
SANDY: Yeah, they might want to check and see if this Muffy person existed.
JIM: Look up her tax preparer ID number ...
SANDY: Used her Social Security number. I don’t know how she got it. That was her business.
JIM: (Back to “Revelations”) Did you have any kind of catharsis in this book? I don’t want to give too much of the plot away.
SANDY: I think when anyone has some tragedy happen to them, one of the things that happens is you kind of get a divided self. Your intellectual self and your physical self are kind of divided. And they have to gradually get back together. I think that Manny, one of the main characters, is too cerebral, too intellectual. And, of course, Abis is way too physical. They have to merge. They have to learn that it’s not reality, it’s your reaction to reality that’s the problem.
JIM: Did you see a little of yourself in Manny?
SANDY: Oh, sure. Especially when I did the first draft. It was very shortly after my first wife died and so I knew exactly where he was back then. And over the years, you see a very different perspective.
JIM: In some ways it reminds me of The Odyssey. Now for the life of me, I gotta say this. I don’t know why he (Manny) didn’t pull out a stick and knock Abis upside the head a couple of times.
SANDY: Me either.
JIM: I’m serious. I just don’t know that I would’ve gotten drunk on a vacation and gone off with a guy that struck me as a little bit of a whack job there.
SANDY: I think that ... well, he (Manny) says at this point, why not? It’s like Hamlet saying my life is not worth a pin’s fee. Why the heck not?
JIM: And this guy (Abis) is a Greek/American Indian?
SANDY: I guess you could say he’s half North American Indian and half madman ... maybe half, depending on what kind of mood he’s in — and when you ask him.
JIM: Were you concerned at all that he (Abis) was going to run away with the whole book?
SANDY: Well, I kind of expected him to. And in some parts, he’s based on two people who I hung around with in those years after my wife died, and probably shouldn’t have been. It’s based on a few real characters, pretty loosely ... just life-forces. But he’s pretty much mostly made up.
JIM: A conversation with him was like having a conversation with, what’s that character’s name, Mrs. Malaprop?
SANDY: Yeah, in fact, I thought about good ol’ Mrs. Malaprop when I was doing him.
JIM: The quest was to find this godlike benefactor (William Love). What can you tell me about that, the quest part of it?
SANDY: I guess it’s that so many people waste so much time in life looking for the meaning of life when it really has no meaning. It’s just an experience we enjoy. It’s like saying what’s the meaning of a flower? Just enjoy its fragrance. Enjoy its beauty. It doesn’t last long.
So, they’re looking for this guy. Does he exist at all? Is Abis really ... there’s the suggestion that Abis is really the one pulling the strings and in charge. ... When Manny finally does actually see him, or does he? He has just been conked over the head — we don’t know. But those are speculations that we all have and, frankly, that’s what it is — speculation. God isn’t speaking to us, so we better start speaking for ourselves.
JIM: What kind of feedback have you gotten over the religious overtones?
SANDY: So far, nobody has seen anything but a positive sense to it. You know, the sense that these speculations — we just don’t know. Nobody knows. So far, nobody has threatened me with damnation or anything like that.
JIM: I guess you haven’t heard from Westboro Church yet.
SANDY: No, the mail’s slow here. Any day. I do notice on the Amazon site when I check there are always ads for the true meaning of Revelation. I don’t think they mean the book. I don’t notice those on the Amazon site in the UK.
JIM: We talked about how long ago you had the idea for this book. Exactly how long did it take you to go from first concept to getting it published?
SANDY: It’s been, like, 25 years that I think I kept revising it and changing it. And the other book, too. And I think part of it is the nature of the publishing industry is changing so much, too. In some ways, it’s easier to get books published.
JIM: When did you decide, “It’s done. I’m ready to let it go”?
SANDY: Well, I’ve been sending it out. One place, I entered it in a contest and it was supposed to be six months. It was a year and a half before they finally got back and they said it won second prize, and second prize is this letter. It just took so long. I’d send it to one place and they’d keep it a year, year and a half. It just took a long time to get around. Oddly enough, I sent this to All Things That Matter Press and I sent “The Viper’s Son” to Burping Frog Press and it was the same week that these books — that I’d been revising and sending out for years — all of a sudden in one week, they were both accepted. ... And “The Viper’s Son” we just recorded as a CD. It’s (the CD’s) not out yet, but it will be fairly soon, maybe in the next six months or so.
JIM: So, what’s ahead?
SANDY: I’m actually revising another one I wrote when I was still in Albany, which is a kind of a bookbinding mystery based on this real book that went down with the Titanic. So, I’m finishing that and I’m starting another one that’s more like a family saga. I plan to start that as soon as I finish cleaning the garage.
JIM: Well, you’ve got to have your priorities.
SANDY: It’s not my priority. ... She says, for some reason, every seven years, you’ve got to clean up the garage.
JIM: That sounds Old Testament.
SANDY: It does when I think about it. I need to mention that to Louise.
JIM: So when you’re not writing or doing your honey-do chore list down there, what do you do?
SANDY: I go kayak fishing; take care of three kids, two dogs and one wife, and that’s about all I can handle right now. You know, somebody’s gotta get out there and catch those fish.
JIM: There going to be a fishing tale anytime soon?
SANDY: I think so. I’ll have to fit one in there somewhere.
Email Editor Jim Hendricks at jim.hendricks@albanyherald.com.
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