Book of Numbers

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

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

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

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

The single best novel yet written about what it means to remain human in the Internet Era

Adam Ross

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

To sum this up in Web terms, he'll 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

Dwight Garner, The New York Times

Intelligent, lyrical, prosaic, theoretical, pragmatic, funny, serious. [Cohen's] best prose does everything at once

James Wood

In Mr Cohen's hands, a meme is a matter of life and death, because he goes from the reality we know - the link, the click - to the one we tend to forget: the human... Mr. Cohen is ambitious. He is mapping terra incognita

The New York Observer

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... Language - not elision - is the primary material of Cohen's oeuvre, and his method of negotiating his way toward meaning is like powering straight through a thick wall of words... The reward is an off-kilter precision, one that feels both untainted and unique

Rachel Kushner, The New York Times Book Review

Like [David Foster] Wallace, Cohen is clearly concerned wtih the depersonalizing effects of technology, broken people doing depraved things, and how the two intersect in tragic (and, sometimes, hilarious) ways. The franticness with which he writes about these themes is, at times, Wallace-esque

The Boston Globe

What dazzles here is a Pynchonesque verbal dexterity, the sonic effect of exotic vocabulary, terraced sentences robust pusn and metaphors and edgy, Tarantino-like dialogue

Review of Contemporary Fiction

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

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

Enthralling… Awe-inspiring

Skinny

Cohen is immensely clever, witty, and indeed funny. He also knows about technology, and thus his novel deals with the world in the age of the internet

Colm Toibin, Daily Mail summer reading

Book of Numbers brilliantly and rigorously examines a question that confronts literature today: What does the explosion of information from the internet mean for the future of storytelling?

Matthew Zeitlin, Buzzfeed

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

Fascinating...for chutzpah alone, Cohen's chaotic fantasia certainly impresses

Observer

Frequently amazing, [it is] the first work of fiction to engage fully with the internet and its influence on modern living

New Scientist

'Deliriously entertaining... [Cohen] has proven himself to be a bold and fearless writer

Economist

There are wonderful things here cloaked with an invisibility spell, tucked away in the middle of the book, where only the stubbornest seeker after enchantment will find them

Adam Mars-Jones, London Review of Books