Lives of the Mind Slaves

For the past two decades Matt Cohen has been one of Canada’s premier writers of fiction, with an impressive list of critically acclaimed and award-winning novels and stories. Lives of the Mind Slaves - composed of eight stories and a novella, all but one of which were previously published - is an excellent sampler of his literary sophistication and craftsmanship. This obviously carefully selected collection, emphasizing the author’s conventional rather than experimental production, exhibits the finely tuned and engaging intelligence we have come to expect in Cohen’s fiction, an intelligence that relentlessly probes and exposes the depths of an urbanized, cosmopolitan, transcultural, and permanently uprooted individual who perceives the mind as his last refuge from life’s randomness, instability, and impermanence.