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.
“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)
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