Book of Numbers - 9780812996913

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. This tech 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.

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

“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

“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 ofAmerican Innovations

“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, [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.”—Rachel Kushner, author ofThe 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.”—The New York Observer