Book of Numbers
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Vintage Publishing
Published:2nd Jun '16
Should be back in stock very soon

A monumental, uproarious, and exuberant novel about the search-for love, truth, and the meaning of Life With The Internet
‘Dazzling and engrossing’ Colm Tóibín, Guardian
A Granta Best Young American Author
Book of Numbers is a novel about two men of the same age and with the same name: Joshua Cohen.
FROM PULITZER PRIZEWINNER JOSHUA COHEN
'Dazzling and engrossing' Colm Tóibín, Guardian
'Untainted and unique' Rachel Kushner
'Intensely perceptive' Independent
Book of Numbers is a novel about two men of the same age and with the same name: Joshua Cohen.
The first Joshua is a writer whose keenly anticipated debut had the bad luck to be published on September 11, 2001.
The other Joshua is the enigmatic billionaire Founder and CEO of the world's most profitable tech company.
Autobiography, family memoir, phoned-in ghostwriting, international thriller, sex comedy - Book of Numbers brings to life the full range of modern experience in the course of its epic journey.
'More impressive than all but a few novels published so far this decade' 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 *
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 *
ISBN: 9780099597384
Dimensions: 198mm x 130mm x 36mm
Weight: 405g
592 pages