Book of Numbers

Joshua Cohen’s novel Book of Numbers reads as if Philip Roth’s work were fired into David Foster Wallace’s inside the Hadron particle collider…Book of Numbers is more impressive than all but a few novels published so far this decade. Mr. Cohen, all of 34, emerges as a major American writer – Dwight Garner * The New York Times *
Joshua Cohen’s novel Book of Numbers reads as if Philip Roth’s work were fired into David Foster Wallace’s inside the Hadron particle collider…Book of Numbers is more impressive than all but a few novels published so far this decade. Mr. Cohen, all of 34, emerges as a major American writer – Dwight Garner * The New York Times *
A hugely ambitious novel set in the high-tech world of now. It is a verbal high-wire act, daring in its tones and textures: clever, poetic, fast-moving, deeply playful, filled with jokes, savvy about machines, wise about people, dazzling and engrossing – Colm Toibin * Guardian *
Intelligent, lyrical, prosaic, theoretical, pragmatic, funny, serious. [Cohen’s] best prose does everything at once – James Wood
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
‘Deliriously entertaining… [Cohen] has proven himself to be a bold and fearless writer * Economist *
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
The single best novel yet written about what it means to remain human in the Internet Era – Adam Ross
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
An ambitious and inspired attempt at the Great American Internet Novel… Cohen’s encyclopedic epic is about many things – language, art, divinity, narrative, desire, global politics, surveillance, consumerism, genealogy – 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 *

Joshua Cohen was born in 1980 in New Jersey. He is the book critic for Harper’s Magazine and the author of several books, including Four New Messages and Attention! A (Short) History. His non-fiction has appeared in the New York Times, the New York Times Book Review, Bookforum, The Forward, The Believer, the New York Observer, the London Review of Books, n+1 and elsewhere. He is a Granta Best Young American author.

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