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Published Jun 2015
592 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
The enigmatic billionaire founder of Tetration, the world's most powerful tech company, hires a failed novelist, Josh Cohen, to ghostwrite his memoirs. The mogul, known as Principal, brings Josh behind the digital veil, tracing the rise of Tetration, which started in the earliest days of the Internet by revolutionizing the search engine before venturing into smartphones, computers, and the surveillance of American citizens. Principal takes Josh on a mind-bending world tour from Palo Alto to Dubai and beyond, initiating him into the secret pretext of the autobiography project and the life-or-death stakes that surround its publication.
Insider tech exposé, leaked memoir-in-progress, international thriller, family drama, sex comedy, and biblical allegory, Book of Numbers renders the full range of modern experience both online and off. Embodying the Internet in its language, it finds the humanity underlying the virtual.
Featuring one of the most unforgettable characters in contemporary fiction, Book of Numbers is an epic of the digital age, a triumph of a new generation of writers, and one of those rare books that renew the idea of what a novel can do.
"Starred Review. An ambitious and inspired attempt at the Great American Internet Novel ... [Joshua] Cohen's encyclopedic epic is about many things ... but it is above all a standout novel about the Internet, humanity's 'first mutual culture,' in which our identities are increasingly defined by a series of ones and zeroes." - Publishers Weekly
"Starred Review. [Cohen] recognizes the laughs and peril at this technologically challenging stage of the human comedy and its new questions about what people are searching for, how the results may affect them, and what it all may cost." - Kirkus
"This is an astounding undertaking. In Book of Numbers the wizardly Joshua Cohen relocates the line between tragedy and comedy. His lurid and high-achieving characters create and suffer the Internet - which is now tightening around us all. I don't know of any other work like this one." - Norman Rush
"Book of Numbers is a lot of things - a disquisition on and aping of the Internet, a dissection of friendship and romance in the Digital Age, and a doppelgänger tale - but for me it's most poignant as an elegy for the written word, and as a rebuke to its decline." - Joshua Ferris, author of To Rise Again at a Decent Hour
"Cohen is one of the most intelligent, witty, and moving writers we have, and Book of Numbers is his most magnificent and ambitious book. This novel illuminates the mysterious and near-invisible landscape of right now." - Rivka Galchen, author of American Innovations
"Brilliant ... the single best novel yet written about what it means to remain human in the Internet Era." - Adam Ross
This information about Book of Numbers was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Joshua Cohen was born in 1980 in Atlantic City. He has written novels (Witz), short fiction (Four New Messages), and nonfiction for The New York Times, London Review of Books, Bookforum, The Forward, and others. He is a critic for Harper's Magazine and lives in New York City.
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