Books

Shortlisted, 2024 Steele Rudd Short Story Award 

‘Wildly inventive. Deeply unsettling. Delightfully strange. The Terrible Event is Cohen’s best, most hilarious book yet. I absolutely loved it.’ 
Bram Presser, author of The Book of Dirt 

‘Cohen balances the ridiculous and the profound with consummate skill. A biting and disarmingly surreal collection.’
Judges’ Comments, 2024 Steele Rudd Short Story Award – Queensland Literary Awards

‘Each instalment is a tightly crafted pocket of madness…’ 
Books + Publishing 

‘…wryly funny, surreal and quirky…’ 
Reading Matters 

‘…sparkling wit, strange, outlandish and mesmerising tales, stories of hilarity and sardonic, satirical ridiculousness, and as is his trademark style, deconstructing the absurdity of bureaucracy, red tape and the rules of life engagement, which in his hands become meaningless examples of the irrationality and farcicality of life.’ 
Cass Moriarty, author of The Promise Seed 

‘…moving, profound, serious, sad, frustrating, absurd and perceptive…Cohen’s creation of situations that resonate so strongly with the reader represents the power and impact great short stories such as these can have.’ 
ArtsHub 

‘These are truly weird, truly wonderful stories from an original mind.’
Good Reading Magazine

‘…the most underrated writer in Australia.’
Peter Goers, ABC Radio Adelaide

‘…a masterly example of dry wit, black humour and absurd understatement.’
ReadPlus

Buy The Terrible Event

Winner, 2019 Russell Prize for Humour Writing 
Shortlisted, 2015 Dorothy Hewett Award for an Unpublished Manuscript 

‘Cohen’s tragi-comic sensibility creates some astonishing moments of what we might think of as the suburban surreal.’
Australian Book Review 

‘David Cohen’s imagination, as evidenced by his short-story collection, The Hunter, is a truly remarkable thing.’ 
The Saturday Paper 

‘It is his eye for the incongruous that is the source of Cohen’s comic talent.’
Sydney Review of Books 

‘Studded with wit and humour.’ FIVE STARS.
The Big Issue 

‘The Hunter and Other Stories of Men is an eclectic collection of short stories that reveal a fine sense of the absurd, the central impulse of lasting humour. The stories are all original and unexpected, each one connected by a unified comic sensibility. These are not the stand-up comedian’s one-liners; they have an awareness of the absurd, the surreal, the comic, in everyday life; the true comic’s unsettling serious gaze at the strange ways we make sense of existence.’
Judges’ Comments, 2019 Russell Prize for Humour Writing 

Buy The Hunter and Other Stories of Men 

‘David Cohen takes suburban life and turns it into a warped comedy with a body count, letting weirdness in, compellingly, irresistibly, until our sense of what’s real is flickering on and off like a dodgy fluoro tube.’
Nick Earls, author of Wisdom Tree 

‘Few writers write about the world of work, and fewer still with the skill and mordant wit of David Cohen. Funny, disturbing, and wonderfully strange.’
Ryan O’Neill, author of Their Brilliant Careers 

‘…(a) downbeat comic meditation on menial work and madness, whose quotient of bizarreness increases as it advances towards an ending marked by ludicrous chutzpah.’
The Weekend Australian 

‘David Cohen captures the repellent main character masterfully in this novel. It is full of vivid descriptions and laugh-out-loud moments that readers will enjoy if they can stand the discomfiture of sitting inside Ken Guy’s head for 224 pages.’
Newtown Review of Books 

‘…one of the oddest books I’ve ever read.’
Herald Sun 

‘Cohen’s gift is really his treatment of the familiar.’ 
The Saturday Paper 

‘A darkly humorous and surprisingly riveting tale…’
Courier Mail 

‘…both an entertaining read and an in-depth insight into the dark side of mental health and its effects on perception, personal relationships and our sense of identity and purpose.’
Westerly 

Buy Disappearing off the Face of the Earth

Winner, 2002 HarperCollins Varuna Award for Manuscript Development

‘…quirky and offbeat with a dry wit and an acute eye for some of the absurdities of contemporary urban life… I thoroughly enjoyed this novel: for its intelligence, its understated humour, its engaging central character, and, not least, its sure grasp of the conventions of the difficult craft of comic writing.’
Westerly 

‘…it wouldn’t be a bad thing if Fear of Tennis became a cult book.’
The Age 

‘…stood out among the novels I read.’
Les Murray, TLS Books of the Year, 2007 

Buy Fear of Tennis