Sam Cohen
Sam Cohen’s Queer Jewish World of Sarahs
Sam Cohen’s inventive and smart short story collection, Sarahland, features 10 stories centered on women named Sarah. There’s a Jewish college student named Sarah dealing with hook-up culture and sexual assault. There’s Sarah of the Bible, who, in Cohen’s writing, is a trans woman who sleeps with Hagar to become the real parents of Ishmael. There’s a Buffy-loving Sarah who writes fan-fiction; there’s an aging lesbian Sarah who literally becomes a tree. Each Sarah is told through a queer, Jewish lens, with tenderness and care.
Sarahland, at its core, “is a book of stories that’s also about stories and storytelling,” writes Cohen to me over e-mail. “I do hope readers come away thinking about the stories that we inherit and the stories that we tell ourselves. In the best case, they feel empowered to some degree to rewrite their own stories.”
Ahead of the release of her debut collection, Cohen and I chatted Sarahs, witchy Judaism, and queerness.
