Reviews
Advance praise for Book of Numbers "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 "Joshua Cohen's 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, author of To Rise Again at a Decent Hour "Joshua 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, author of American Innovations "There once was a time Before Computers--a second B.C.--that we're now using our computers to delete: a time before e-mail, msgs, apps, and urls, when privacy wasn't a setting and attachments were to people, when search meant finding something in the real world, and being connected meant you weren't alone. These are some of the things I was reminded of while reading Joshua Cohen's brilliant Book of Numbers, the single best novel yet written about what it means to remain human in the Internet Era." --Adam Ross Praise for Joshua Cohen "To sum this up in Web terms, [Joshua Cohen will] make you want to be an angel investor in his stuff. What's a book but a public offering? You'll want to be in on the ground floor." -- The New York Times "Intelligent, lyrical, prosaic, theoretical, pragmatic, funny, serious . . . [Cohen's] best prose does everything at once." -- The New Yorker "Cohen, a key member of the United States' under-40 writers' club (along with Nell Freudenberger and Jonathan Safran Foer), is a rare talent who makes highbrow writing fun and accessible." -- Marie Claire "Cohen has manifold talents at digging under and around absurdity. . . . The reward is an off-kilter precision, one that feels both untainted and unique." --Rachel Kushner, author of The Flamethrowers "In Mr. Cohen's hands, a meme is a matter of life and death, because he goes from the reality we all know--the link, the click--to the one we tend to forget: the human. . . . Cohen is ambitious. He is mapping terra incognita." -- The New York Observer, Advance praise for Book of Numbers "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 "Joshua Cohen's 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, author of To Rise Again at a Decent Hour "Joshua 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, author of American Innovations "There once was a time Before Computers--a second B.C.--that we're now using our computers to delete: a time before e-mail, msgs, apps, and urls, when privacy wasn't a setting and attachments were to people, when search meant finding something in the real world, and being connected meant you weren't alone. These are some of the things I was reminded of while reading Joshua Cohen's brilliant Book of Numbers, the single best novel yet written about what it means to remain human in the Internet Era." --Adam Ross "An ambitious and inspired attempt at the Great American Internet Novel . . . [Joshua] 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) "Cohen riffs impressively on countless Web-related matters, from chaos to code to venture capital to Y2K. . . . [He] also 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) Praise for Joshua Cohen "To sum this up in Web terms, [Joshua Cohen will] make you want to be an angel investor in his stuff. What's a book but a public offering? You'll want to be in on the ground floor." -- The New York Times "Intelligent, lyrical, prosaic, theoretical, pragmatic, funny, serious . . . [Cohen's] best prose does everything at once." -- The New Yorker "Cohen, a key member of the United States' under-40 writers' club (along with Nell Freudenberger and Jonathan Safran Foer), is a rare talent who makes highbrow writing fun and accessible." -- Marie Claire "Cohen has manifold talents at digging under and around absurdity. . . . The reward is an off-kilter precision, one that feels both untainted and unique." --Rachel Kushner, author of The Flamethrowers "In Mr. Cohen's hands, a meme is a matter of life and death, because he goes from the reality we all know--the link, the click--to the one we tend to forget: the human. . . . Cohen is ambitious. He is mapping terra incognita." -- The New York Observer
