Joshua Cohen. (2015). Book of Numbers: A Novel. Random House Publishing Group.

Joshua Cohen. 2015. Book of Numbers: A Novel. Random House Publishing Group.

Joshua Cohen, Book of Numbers: A Novel. Random House Publishing Group, 2015.

Joshua Cohen. Book of Numbers: A Novel. Random House Publishing Group, 2015.

OverDrive Product Record

images

• cover:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-100/0111-1/{C46BC698-01F0-4613-B5CB-A3BF1E20E878}Img100.jpg
  • type: image/jpeg
• thumbnail:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-200/0111-1/{C46BC698-01F0-4613-B5CB-A3BF1E20E878}Img200.jpg
  • type: image/jpeg
• cover150Wide:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-150/0111-1/C46/BC6/98/{C46BC698-01F0-4613-B5CB-A3BF1E20E878}Img150.jpg
  • type: image/jpeg
• cover300Wide:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-400/0111-1/C46/BC6/98/{C46BC698-01F0-4613-B5CB-A3BF1E20E878}Img400.jpg
  • type: image/jpeg

formats

1. • identifiers:
     1. • type: ISBN
        • value: 9780812996920
     2. • type: PublisherCatalogNumber
        • value: 240498
   • name: Adobe EPUB eBook
   • id: ebook-epub-adobe
2. • identifiers:
     1. • type: ASIN
        • value: B00O6V69RW
     2. • type: PublisherCatalogNumber
        • value: 240498
   • name: Kindle Book
   • id: ebook-kindle
3. • identifiers:
     1. • type: ISBN
        • value: 9780812996920
     2. • type: PublisherCatalogNumber
        • value: 240498
   • name: OverDrive Read
   • id: ebook-overdrive

mediaType

eBook

primaryCreator

• role: Author
• name: Joshua Cohen

title

Book of Numbers

dateAdded

2015-12-23T17:32:00-05:00

contentDetails

1. • href: https://link.overdrive.com/?websiteID=141&titleID=2053155
   • type: text/html
   • account:
     • name: Sacramento Public Library (CA)
     • id: 1151

sortTitle

Book of Numbers A Novel

crossRefId

2053155

subtitle

A Novel

id

c46bc698-01f0-4613-b5cb-a3bf1e20e878

starRating

3.2

OverDrive MetaData

isPublicDomain

False

formats

1. • fileName: BookofNumbers_9780812996920_2053155
   • partCount: 0
   • fileSize: 4450240
   • identifiers:
     1. • type: ISBN
        • value: 9780812996920
     2. • type: PublisherCatalogNumber
        • value: 240498
   • rights:
     1. • type: Copying
        • value: 0
     2. • type: Printing
        • value: 0
     3. • type: Lending
        • value: 0
     4. • type: ReadAloud
        • value: 0
     5. • type: ExpirationRights
        • value: 0
   • name: Adobe EPUB eBook
   • isReadAlong: False
   • id: ebook-epub-adobe
   • onSaleDate: 6/9/2015
   • samples:
     1. • source: From the book
        • formatType: ebook-overdrive
        • url: https://samples.overdrive.com/?crid=c46bc698-01f0-4613-b5cb-a3bf1e20e878&.epub-sample.overdrive.com
2. • fileName: BookofNumbers_2053155
   • partCount: 0
   • fileSize: 0
   • identifiers:
     1. • type: PublisherCatalogNumber
        • value: 240498
     2. • type: ASIN
        • value: B00O6V69RW
   • name: Kindle Book
   • isReadAlong: False
   • id: ebook-kindle
   • onSaleDate: 6/9/2015
   • samples:
     1. • source: From the book
        • formatType: ebook-overdrive
        • url: https://samples.overdrive.com/?crid=c46bc698-01f0-4613-b5cb-a3bf1e20e878&.epub-sample.overdrive.com
3. • fileName: BookofNumbers_9780812996920_2053155
   • partCount: 0
   • fileSize: 4301469
   • identifiers:
     1. • type: ISBN
        • value: 9780812996920
     2. • type: PublisherCatalogNumber
        • value: 240498
   • name: OverDrive Read
   • isReadAlong: False
   • id: ebook-overdrive
   • onSaleDate: 6/9/2015
   • samples:
     1. • source: From the book
        • formatType: ebook-overdrive
        • url: https://samples.overdrive.com/?crid=c46bc698-01f0-4613-b5cb-a3bf1e20e878&.epub-sample.overdrive.com

keywords

1. • value: autofiction
2. • value: social networking
3. • value: 21st century
4. • value: Jewish
5. • value: literary fiction
6. • value: Postmodernism
7. • value: Computers
8. • value: principal
9. • value: internet
10. • value: contemporary fiction
11. • value: crime
12. • value: Thrillers
13. • value: American fiction
14. • value: Religion
15. • value: silicon valley
16. • value: privacy
17. • value: suspense
18. • value: surveillance
19. • value: Corporations
20. • value: Digital Age
21. • value: New York
22. • value: Technology
23. • value: Social Media
24. • value: search engine
25. • value: American Literature
26. • value: Jewish fiction
27. • value: mystery books
28. • value: 21st century american literature
29. • value: contemporary literary fiction
30. • value: tech industry
31. • value: computer novel
32. • value: digital surveillance
33. • value: internet fiction
34. • value: internet novel
35. • value: systems novel

creators

1. • role: Author
   • fileAs: Cohen, Joshua
   • bioText: 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.
   • name: Joshua Cohen

imprint

Random House

publishDate

2015-06-09T00:00:00-04:00

isOwnedByCollections

True

title

Book of Numbers

fullDescription

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 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

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: The New York Times
   • content: "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."
2. • premium: False
   • source: Rolling Stone
   • content: "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."
3. • premium: False
   • source: The Wall Street Journal
   • content: "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."
4. • premium: False
   • source: Francine Prose, The New York Review of Books
   • content: "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."
5. • premium: False
   • source: Colm Tóibín, The Guardian
   • content: "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."
6. • premium: False
   • source: Adam Kirsch, Tablet
   • content: "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."
7. • premium: False
   • source: The New York Times Book Review
   • content: "A digital-age Ulysses."
8. • premium: False
   • source: Details
   • content: "The next candidate for the Great American Novel . . . David Foster Wallace--level audacious."
9. • premium: False
   • source: The Boston Globe
   • content: "A brilliant book."
10. • premium: False
    • source: Flavorwire
    • content: "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."
11. • premium: False
    • source: The A.V. Club
    • content: "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."
12. • premium: False
    • source: Publishers Weekly (starred review)
    • content: "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."
13. • premium: False
    • source: Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
    • content: "An investigation of the technologies that mediate our collective fears and desires . . . [Book of Numbers
14. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      Starred review from March 30, 2015
      Like Pynchon's Bleeding Edge and Eggers's The Circle, Cohen's (Witz) latest is an ambitious and inspired attempt at the Great American Internet Novel. The narrator, Joshua Cohen, is a struggling writer whose debut effort was inauspiciously launched on Sept. 10, 2001. Deciding to "earn better money... at the expense of identity," he agrees to ghostwrite the memoir of another Joshua Cohen, referred to as "Principal." Principal is the secretive founder of Tetration, a tech company that has developed a revolutionary search engine and seeks to "equalize ourselves with data and data with ourselves." Speaking to his ghostwriter in the first-person plural he leisurely relates the genesis and evolution of Tetration while sprinkling in a mixture of ominous epigrams ("All who read us are read"), mystical musings, and "techsperanto," the language of Silicon Valley. But Principal has another motive in sharing his story, one that forces his biographer to go into hiding, and offline, to complete his task. The novel maps the recent history of the Internet onto one of Western culture's oldest stories, the plague-filled wanderings of Moses and his fractious band of Israelites journeying toward the Promised Land. This allegorical element imposes just enough order on a saga as sprawling and unruly as the Web. A dense, thrilling, and occasionally perplexing work, 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.

15. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      Starred review from April 15, 2015
      A writer's effort to prepare a biography of a Google-like company's founder sits at the core of this smart, choppy novel that's trying to take on technology, creativity, and much else. In a couple hundred pages fewer than 2010's mammoth Witz, Cohen (Four New Messages, 2012, etc.) presents a writer named Joshua Cohen whose last novel fared poorly because it came out on Sept. 11, 2001. Ten years later, the fictional writer is offered the job of writing "the memoir of the Joshua Cohen I'm always mistaken for," the "genius googolionaire" creator of the Internet-search firm Tetration.com. Long stretches rich in high-tech lingo entail the Web genius describing his growing up, how the company got going, and how success affected the initial team, particularly the enigmatic Moe, who made searching profitable and then disappeared. The villain-whose complicity with the government raises echoes of Edward Snowden and Julian Assange-is the unsubtly named Tetration president, Kori Dienerowitz (with the likely laugh that the real writer may have made little dinero on Witz). The first fictional Cohen's rocky marriage allows for fun pokes at bad blogs (his wife's) and sloppy emails (her boyfriend's). The real Cohen riffs impressively on countless Web-related matters, from chaos to code to venture capital to Y2K and the woes of single-minded work: "we had ringworm, shingles, scabies, and mule lymphangitis...circadian rhythm disorder, tendonitis." The corollary for common readers could be frustration at the flood of tech terms, shorthand, and slang. It's comparable on both counts to William Gaddis' comic dissection of postwar finance in JR. Like Gaddis, Cohen 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.

      COPYRIGHT(2015) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

16. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      Starred review from May 15, 2015
      

      Language is paramount in Cohen's work. His last novel, Witz, was a linguistically dexterous work spanning more than 800 pages. Two-page sentences spiked with shards of scattered verses invited the reader into the deep psyche of his characters. Here, the author pens a syntactically enticing narrative of technology. The main character, Joshua Cohen, is an unsuccessful novelist who makes a living as a ghostwriter. He has written everything from PhD dissertations to conference presentations for academics. However, when he is contacted by the CEO of Tetration, one of the world's most successful tech firms, to ghostwrite his memoir, Cohen's life transforms from the mundane to the electrifying. What starts as just another freelance job ends in an investigation of the technologies that mediate our collective fears and desires. Delving deep into the semantic web of our networked lives, Cohen pushes the reader into the wasteland of our abbreviated vocabulary, one SQL (structured query language) at a time. VERDICT Much like Cohen's previous work, this densely packed narrative will appeal to readers with an appreciation for experimental fiction and the ever-expanding limits of language.--Joshua Finnell, Denison Univ. Lib., Granville, OH

      Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

popularity

240

links

• self:
  • href: https://api.overdrive.com/v1/collections/v1L1BWwAAAA2I/products/c46bc698-01f0-4613-b5cb-a3bf1e20e878/metadata
  • type: application/vnd.overdrive.api+json

id

c46bc698-01f0-4613-b5cb-a3bf1e20e878

starRating

3.1

images

• cover:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-100/0111-1/{C46BC698-01F0-4613-B5CB-A3BF1E20E878}Img100.jpg
  • type: image/jpeg
• thumbnail:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-200/0111-1/{C46BC698-01F0-4613-B5CB-A3BF1E20E878}Img200.jpg
  • type: image/jpeg
• cover150Wide:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-150/0111-1/C46/BC6/98/{C46BC698-01F0-4613-B5CB-A3BF1E20E878}Img150.jpg
  • type: image/jpeg
• cover300Wide:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-400/0111-1/C46/BC6/98/{C46BC698-01F0-4613-B5CB-A3BF1E20E878}Img400.jpg
  • type: image/jpeg

isPublicPerformanceAllowed

False

languages

1. • code: en
   • name: English

subjects

1. • value: Fiction
2. • value: Literature
3. • value: Thriller

publishDateText

06/09/2015

otherFormatIdentifiers

1. • type: ISBN
   • value: 9780812996913

mediaType

eBook

shortDescription

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 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...

sortTitle

Book of Numbers A Novel

crossRefId

2053155

subtitle

A Novel

publisher

Random House Publishing Group

bisacCodes

1. • code: FIC019000
   • description: Fiction / Literary
2. • code: FIC036000
   • description: Fiction / Thrillers / Technological
3. • code: FIC046000
   • description: Fiction / Jewish