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NATIONAL BESTSELLER • “A wheeling 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 NetanyahusNAMED 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 BloomThe 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
Cohen's finest work to date and certain to cement his reputation as one of the finest novelists of his generation.While Cohen's previous works have engaged history to clarify the digital age, Book of Numbers is a truly a tome of the times, a work not just of the moment but of the microsecond.The novel tells the story of a struggling writer named Joshua Cohen who is hired to ghost write the memoirs of a tech CEO, also named Joshua Cohen. As we follow our hero as he criss-crosses both space and linear time leaving the reader with a sense of digital-age fragmentation, the story rests on a firmly built plot, more so than some of Cohen's previous sprawling or lyrical work. But surely the gift Cohen has given us--and one of the major themes of the book--is his language.Cohen's prose can be difficult, funny, brilliant, but to call it lyrical isn't quite right. It hums with the staccato beat of a clacking keyboard--a billion individual pixelated strikes on the brain. It is a language that can only exist at this moment, and yet the tossed off emoji-adorned text of the internet is dignified here under Cohen's nimble thumbs. But it's not all of the now--Cohen claims inspiration from ancient Sanskirt rhythms--which may sound far fetched, but speakers of contemporary Hebrew may relate: As Etgar Keret has alluded to, the juxtaposition of the ultramodern with the ancient is commonplace in spoken Hebrew, and perhaps we feel some of that ease in Cohen's prose. Wherever it came from, we welcome it.The novel is Joycean in its intellectual rigor, but lacks Jocye's candle-lit warmth, opting instead for a liquid crystal coolness that some readers may find distancing. And critics of Nabokov like Yevgeny Yevtushenko who claimed he could hear the "clatter of surgical tools" in the master's prose will hear not just Cohen's scalpel but his rib spreader and his chainsaw, as every sentence in this book feels like it's been worked over. But it's all to pleasurable effect to this reader. May this mad scientist of pastiche carry on.Rarely has a novel so sprawling felt so contemporary, and rarely has a novel so rigorous been so fun--the voracious mind of Joshua Cohen is indeed a rich world. The novel is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand not only how the internet is affecting our language, but how we understand ourselves. Kudos to Mr Cohen on the achievement, and look forward to his future scribblings.
