NATIONAL BESTSELLER •“Awheeling meditation on the wired life, on privacy, on what being human in the age of binary code might mean”(The New York Times), from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Netanyahus NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY VULTURE AND ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR AND THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
“Shatteringly powerful . . . I cannot think of anything by anyone in [Cohen’s] generation that is so frighteningly relevant and composed with such continuous eloquence. There are moments in it that seem to transcend our impasse.”—Harold Bloom
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.
Praise for Book of Numbers
“The Great American Internet Novel is here. . . . Book of Numbers is a fascinating look at the dark heart of the Web. . . . A page-turner about life under the veil of digital surveillance . . . one of the best novels ever written about the Internet.”—Rolling Stone
“A startlingly talented novelist.”—The Wall Street Journal
“Remarkable . . . dazzling . . . Cohen’s literary gifts . . . suggest that something is possible, that something still might be done to safeguard whatever it is that makes us human.”—Francine Prose, The New York Review of Books
About the Author
Joshua Cohen was born in 1980 in Atlantic City. His books include the novels The Netanyahus, winner of the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, Moving Kings, Book of Numbers, Witz, A Heaven of Others, and Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto; the short-fiction collection Four New Messages, and the nonfiction collection Attention: Dispatches from a Land of Distraction. Cohen was awarded Israel’s 2013 Matanel Prize for Jewish Writers, and in 2017 was named one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists. He lives in New York City.
Praise For…
“Book of Numbers . . . is shatteringly powerful. I cannot think of anything by anyone in [Cohen’s] generation that is so frighteningly relevant and composed with such continuous eloquence. There are moments in it that seem to transcend our impasse.”—Harold Bloom
“More impressive than all but a few novels published so far this decade . . . a wheeling meditation on the wired life, on privacy, on what being human in the age of binary code might mean . . . [Joshua] Cohen, all of thirty-four, emerges as a major American writer.”—The New York Times
“The Great American Internet Novel is here. . . . Joshua Cohen’s Book of Numbers is a fascinating look at the dark heart of the Web. . . . A page-turner about life under the veil of digital surveillance . . . one of the best novels ever written about the Internet . . . At its heart, Book of Numbers is an attempt to reclaim a sense of humanity in the digital age.”—Rolling Stone
“Joshua Cohen is a startlingly talented novelist. . . . [His] deeply rewarding novel is about an online religion gone wrong—and its importance lies in the fact that nearly all of us in the modernized world are members of that faith, whether we know it or not.”—The Wall Street Journal
“Remarkable . . . dazzling . . . Cohen’s literary gifts . . . suggest that something is possible, that something still might be done to safeguard whatever it is that makes us human.”—Francine Prose, The New York Review of Books
“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 Tóibín, The Guardian
“Joshua Cohen is the Great American Novelist. . . . Like Pynchon and Wallace, Cohen can write with tireless virtuosity about absolutely everything. . . . Cohen has turned the tables on the Internet: Instead of being reduced by its omniscience, he forces it to serve his imaginative purposes. . . . If John Henry is going to compete with the steam engine, he needs an almost superhuman energy and intelligence of his own—and if any writer has it, it is Joshua Cohen.”—Adam Kirsch, Tablet
“A digital-age Ulysses.”—The New York Times Book Review
“The next candidate for the Great American Novel . . . David Foster Wallace–level audacious.”—Details
“A brilliant book.”—The Boston Globe
“Frequently hilarious high satire of our digital world . . . a book after William Gaddis’s heart that will be around well after most summer reads have been recycled (or deleted).”—New York
“[A] monstrous talent and restive, roiling intellect . . . Other recent literary novels have treated the dot-com-mania reboot, its flagship companies, and their ‘disruptive’ technologies—Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge, Dave Eggers’s The Circle—but Cohen’s is the best.”—Bookforum
“Reading Cohen’s magnum opus is a lot like falling down an Internet wormhole. In Numbers, you’ll find an international mystery, a fake memoir, a modern retelling of the biblical Book of Numbers, a sex romp, and a bunch of leaked documents. Think David Foster Wallace meets David Mitchell meets the search history that you just cleared. Beast.”—Esquire
“Book of Numbers has been called both ‘the Great Internet Novel’ and ‘the Great American Novel.’ The book, published by Cohen at the age of thirty-four, succeeds at doing to the Internet what David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest—also published when its author was thirty-four—attempted to do to television. It humanizes it.”—Flavorwire
“An urgent and necessary sign of life in U.S. literature.”—The Rumpus
“Book of Numbers is alive with humor and insight. Cohen has been compared to Philip Roth multiple times, but the similarities are perhaps most obvious in this book.”—The A.V. Club
“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)
“An investigation of the technologies that mediate our collective fears and desires . . . [Book of Numbers] will appeal to readers with an appreciation for experimental fiction and the ever-expanding limits of language.”—Library Journal (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 Reviews (starred review)
