Book of Numbers

Joshua Cohen was born in 1980 in New Jersey. He is the book critic for Harper’s Magazine and the author of several books, including Four New Messages and Attention! A (Short) History. His non-fiction has appeared in the New York Times, the New York Times Book Review, Bookforum, The Forward, The Believer, the New York Observer, the London Review of Books, n+1 and elsewhere. He is a Granta Best Young American author.

"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 "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 "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 doppelganger tale - but for me it's most poignant as an elegy for the written word, and as a rebuke to its decline" -- Joshua Ferris