Book of Numbers

“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.”—The New York Times

A monumental, uproarious, and exuberant novel about the search—for love, truth, and the meaning of Life With The Internet.

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 expose, 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.

Please note that Book of Numbers uses a special pagination system inspired by binary notation: the part number precedes the page number, and is separated from it by a decimal point.

Praise for Book of Numbers

“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.”—Tablet

“The next candidate for the Great American Novel . . . David Foster Wallace–level audacious.”—Details

“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.”—The Wall Street Journal

“Frequently hilarious high satire of our digital world . . . a stranger, more layered critique than, say, Dave Eggers’sThe Circle—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’sBleeding Edge, Dave Eggers’s The Circle—but Cohen’s is the best.”—Bookforum

“Think David Foster Wallace meets David Mitchell meets the search history that you just cleared.”—Esquire


From the Hardcover edition.

Joshua Cohen was born in 1980 in Atlantic City. He has written novels (Witz), short fiction (Four New Messages), and nonfiction forThe New York Times, London Review of Books, Bookforum, The Forward, and others. He is a critic forHarper’s Magazine and lives in New York City.