Reviews

“I loved Sarahland. Like the best fiction, it both articulated and deepened what were for me previously unspeakable, but urgent mysteries, including why feminine and/or feminist utopias are always half-beautiful, half-grotesque; how the world ends; and where American class aspiration and the quest for freedom meet, which is to say, what a Jewish girl from the suburbs who wants out is chasing, what she’s fleeing, and how far she can really get.”—LA Review of Books

"A bold collection that explores how we might break free from or reimagine ourselves and our places in the universe." —Kirkus, starred review

“These stories abound with pop culture references and gossip, transformation, soft science fiction and fantasy, and a recurring interest in dolphins. Not just dolphins; the Sarahs and not-Sarahs in this book often find themselves in communion with—even becoming—more-than-human people: horses, trees, cat women, crows, life-sized Barbie doll sorority girls, creatures from earth’s multi-million-year future, even Mother Nature herself, and God, too.”—FF2

“Cohen’s stories charge one another with their overlap until we understand that Sarahs are basic, transcendent, and primordial all at once…Sarahland is Tempur-pedic, and its characters collapse while the stories take perfect form around them, caring for them tirelessly, finding words for their desires, whatever they may be.” —Michigan Quarterly Review

“The stories themselves push the expectations of storytelling, venturing into the fantastical. Cohen embraces the bizarre, and often leverages it against the ordinary. Sarahland is a uniquely premised collection successfully corralling a varied assortment of ideas into a singular, unified statement.”—Chicago Review of Books

“Cohen’s lan­guage and her arrest­ing use of sim­i­le show her pow­er as a writer, but it is Cohen’s uncon­tained, vivid imag­i­na­tion that makes Sarahland unusual…On par with Char­lotte Perkins Gilman’s ​“The Yel­low Wall­pa­per,”…​“Becom­ing Trees” is the para­ble for our time. Sarahland is a book to read and savor; Sam Cohen, a name to watch.” —Jewish Book Council

“A psychedelic plunge…Cohen has a gift for staging heavy emotional topics in dreamlike scenes, both feeding into one another and creating a whimsical host of meaningful visuals. Encapsulates that anxious desperation to be liberated—from who we are told we are, from ecological collapse, and from the capitalist delusion that any of it is isolated from a whole. —SPINE Magazine

"Cohen cleverly reimagines the world through a queer lens and uses pop culture and fairy tale references to illustrate the various lives, stories, and worlds the Sarahs can inhabit. A thought-provoking work, Cohen’s collection surprises and excites." —Publishers Weekly

“Sarahland is still just a ton of fun to read—at turns thought-provoking, funny, strange and exhilarating. With Sarahland, Cohen has asserted herself as a worthy contemporary of Ottessa Moshfegh, Elif Batuman and Carmen Maria Machado.” —PureWow

"Each Sarah is a revitalization of how stories are told and how our stories as humans shape us. Cohen showcases how unbelievably unique and talented she is. Her mind offers stories we seem to be familiar with but allows them to stretch to unexpected places." —Debutiful

"Sam Cohen’s debut book of short stories is an expansive multiverse in which various iterations of a Sarah slide their fingers in the grimy mulch of being, sifting through, eating, and vomiting out what they find there." —Bomb Magazine

“The book’s intimacy and vulnerability reminded me why I love to write. What was more astonishing, for me, was that the stories opened up possibilities for how to live. It was a gift to find myself in these pages.” —Split Lip Magazine