Book of Numbers

Book of Numbers

by Joshua Cohen
Book of Numbers

Book of Numbers

by Joshua Cohen

eBook

$7.99 

Available on Compatible NOOK Devices and the free NOOK Apps.
WANT A NOOK?  Explore Now

Related collections and offers


Overview

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

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780812996920
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Publication date: 06/09/2015
Sold by: Random House
Format: eBook
Pages: 592
File size: 5 MB

About the Author

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.

Read an Excerpt

8/27? 28? two days before end of Ramadan

If you’re reading this on a screen, fuck off. I’ll only talk if I’m gripped with both hands.

Paper of pulp, covers of board and cloth, the thread from threadstuff or—what are bindings made of? hair and plant fibers, glue from boiled horsehooves?

The paperback was compromise enough. And that’s what I’ve become: paper spine, paper limbs, brain of cheapo crumpled paper, the final type that publishers used before surrendering to the touch displays, that bad thin four-times-deinked recycled crap, 100% acidfree postconsumer waste.

I have very few books with me here—Hitler’s Secretary: A Firsthand Account, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life, whatever was on the sales table at Foyles on Charing Cross Road, and in the langues anglais section of the FNAC on the Rue de Rennes—books I’m using as models, paragons of what to avoid.

I’m writing a memoir, of course—half bio, half autobio, it feels—I’m writing the memoir of a man not me.

It begins in a resort, a suite.

I’m holed up here, blackout shades downed, drowned in loud media, all to keep from having to deal with yet another country outside the window.

If I’d kept the eyemask and earplugs from the jet, I wouldn’t even have to describe this, there’s nothing worse than description: hotel room prose. No, characterization is worse. No, dialogue is. Suffice it to say that these pillows are each the size of the bed I used to share in NY. Anyway this isn’t quite a hotel. It’s a cemetery for people both deceased and on vacation, who still check in daily with work.

As for yours truly, I’ve been sitting with my laptop atop a pillow on my lap to keep those wireless hotspot waveparticles from reaching my genitals and frying my sperm, searching up—with my employer’s technology—myself, and Rach.

My wife, my ex, my “x2b.”

\

Living by the check, by the log—living remotely, capitalhopping, skipping borders, jumping timezones, yet always with that equatorial chain of blinking beeping messages to maintain, what Principal calls “the conversation”—it gets lonely.

For the both of us.

Making tours of the local offices, or just of overpriced museums to live in. Claridge’s, Hôtel de Crillon. Meeting with British staff to discuss removing the UK Only option from the homepage. Meeting French staff to discuss the .Fr launch of Autotet. Granting angel audiences to the CEOs of Yalp and Ilinx. Being pitched, but not catching, a new parkour exergame and a betting app for fantasy rugby.

This was micromanaging, microminimanaging. Nondelegation, demotion (voluntary), absorption of duties (insourcing), dirtytasking. All of them at once. In the lexicon of the prevailing techsperanto.

This was Principal spun like a boson just trying to keep it, keep everything, together.

At least until Europe was behind us and we could stay ensuite, he could stay seated, in interviews with me. Between the naps, interviewing for me.

You call the person you’re writing “the principal” and mine is basically the internet, the web—that’s how he’s positioned, that’s how he’s converged: the man who helped to invent the thing, rather the man who helped it to invent us, in the process shredding the hell out of the paper I’ve dedicated my life to. Though don’t for a moment assume he regards it as, what? ironic or wry? that now, at our mutual attainment of 40 (his birthday just behind him, mine just ahead), he’s feeling the urge to put his life down in writing, into writing on paper.

He has no time for irony or wryness. He has time for only himself.

\

cant wait 4 wknd, Rach updates.

margaritas tonite #maryslaw

ever time i type divorce i type deforce (still trying 2 serve papers)

read that my weights the same as hers—feelingood til the reveal: shes 2 inches taller—ewwww!!

“She” who was two inches taller was a model, and though Rach’s in advertising I never expected her to be just as public, to enjoy such projections.

To be sure, she enjoys them anonymously.

My last stretch in NY I’d been searching “Rachava Cohen-Binder,” finding the purest professionalism—her profile at her agency’s site—searching “Rachava Binder,” getting inundated with comments she’d left on a piece of mine (“Journalism Criticizing the Web, Popular on the Web,” The New York Times). It was only in Palo Alto that I searched “Rachav Binder” and “Rach Binder,” got an undousable flame of her defense of an article of mine critical of the Mormon Church’s databasing of Holocaust victims in order to speed their posthumous conversions (“Net Costs,” The Atlantic), and finally it was either in London or Paris, I forget, because I was trashed, that I, on a trashy whim, searched “Teva Café Detroit MI,” but the results suggested I’d meant “Tevazu Café Detroit MI”—cyber chastisement for having incorrectly spelled the place where I’d proposed with ring on bended knee.

One site—and one site alone—had made that same spelling mistake, though, and when I clicked through I found others even graver:

a-bintel-b was a blog, hosted by a platform developed by my employer, which is more famous for having developed the search engine—the one everyone uses to find everyone else, movie times, how to fix my TV tutorials, is this herpes? how much does Gisele Bündchen weigh?

Though her accounts lack facts—and Majuscules, and punctuation—I haven’t been able to stop reading, can’t stop reminding myself that what I read was written in my, in our, apartment. Between the walls, which have been redone a univeige, a cosmic latte shade—the floors have similarly been buffed of my traces.

I wasn’t ready to get reacquainted with the old young flirty Rach. Not on this blog, which she began in the summer, just after we severed, and especially not while I was estranged abroad, in London, Paris, Dubai as of this morning—if it’s Sunday it must be Dubai—with Principal negotiating the dunespace for a datacenter.

Apparently.

\

Remember that old joke, let’s set it in an airport, at the security checkpoint, when a guard asks to inspect a bag, opens the bag, and removes from it a suspicious book.

“What’s it about?” he asks.

And the passenger answers, “About 500 pages!!!!”

Contracted as of two weeks ago, due in four months. Simultaneous hardcover release in six languages, 100,000 announced first printing (US), my name nowhere on it, in a sense.

As of now all I have is its title, which is also the name of its author, which is also the name of his ghost.

Me, my own.

Though my contract with Principal has a confidentiality clause—beyond that, a clause that forbids my mentioning our confidentiality clause, another barring me from disclosing that, and yet another barring me from going online, I assume for life—I can’t help myself (Rach and I might still have a thing or two in common):

I, Joshua Cohen, am writing the memoir of the Joshua Cohen I’m always mistaken for—the incorrect JC, the error msg J. The man whose business has ruined my business, whose pleasure has ruined my pleasure, whose name has obliviated my own.

Disambiguation:

Did you mean Joshua Cohen? The genius, googolionaire, Founder and CEO of Tetration.com, as of now—datestamped 8/27, timecoded 22:12 Central European Summer Time—hits #1 through #324 for “Joshua Cohen” on Tetration.com.

Or Joshua Cohen? The failed novelist, poet, husband and son, pro journalist, speechwriter and ghostwriter, as of now—datestamped 8/28, timecoded 00:14 Gulf Standard Time—hit #325 “my” highest ranking on Tetration.com.

#325 mentions my first book—the book I’m writing this book, my last, to forget. The book that everyone but me already buried. Also I’m trying to earn better money, this time, at the expense of identity. Rach, my support, had been keeping me in both.

But it was only after my session with Principal today—two Joshes just joshing around in the Emirates—that I decided to write this.

Coming back from Principal’s orchidaceous suite to my own chandeliered crèmefest of an accommodation, alive with talk and perked on caffeines, I realized that the only record of my one life would be this record of another’s. That as the wrong JC it was up to me and only me to tell them to stop—to tell Rach to stop searching for her husband (I’m here), to tell my mother to stop searching for her son (I’m here), to send my regrets to you both and remember you, Dad—I’m hoping to get together, all on the same page.

://

10 years ago this September, 10 Arab Muslims hijacked two airplanes and flew them into the Twin Towers of my Life & Book. My book was destroyed—my life has never recovered.

And so it was, the End before the beginning: two jets fueled with total strangers, terrorists—two of whom were Emirati—bombing my career, bombing me personally. And now let me debunk all the conspiracies: George W. Bush didn’t have the towers taken down with controlled demolitions, the FAA didn’t take its satellites offline to let the jets fly over NY airspace unimpeded, the Israeli government didn’t withhold intel about what was going to happen (all just to have a pretext for another Gulf War), and as for the theory that no Jews died or were even harmed in the attacks—what am I? what was this?

That day was my final page, my last word, ellipses . . . ellipses . . . period—closing the covers on all my writing, all my rewriting, all my investments of all the money my father had left me and my mother had loaned me in travel, computer equipment/support, translation help, and research materials (Moms never let me repay my loans).

I’d worried for months, fretted for years, checked thesauri and dictionaries for other verbs I could do, I’d paced. I couldn’t sleep or wake, fantasized best, worst, and average case scenarios. Working on a book had been like being pregnant, or like planning an invasion of Poland. To write it I’d taken a parttime job in a bookstore, I’d taken off from my parttime job in the bookstore, I’d lived cheaply in Ridgewood and avoided my friends, I’d been avoided by friends, procrastinated by spending noons at the Battery squatting alone on a boulder across from a beautiful young paleskinned blackhaired mother rocking a stroller back and forth with a fetish boot while she read a book I pretended was mine, hoping that her baby stayed sleeping forever or at least until I’d finished the thing its mother was reading—I’d been finishing it forever—I’d just finished it, I’d just finished and handed it in.

I handed it to my agent, Aaron, who read it and loved it and handed it to my editor, Finnity, who read it and if he didn’t love it at least accepted it and cut a check the size of a page—which he posted to Aar who took his percentage before he posted the remainder to me—before he, Finnity, scheduled the publication for “the holidays” (Christmas), which in the publishing industry means scheduled for a season before “the holidays” (Christmas), to be set out front in the fall at whatever nonchain bookstores were at the time being replaced by chain bookstores about to be replaced by your preferred online retailer. The book, my book, to be stuffed into a stocking hanging so close to the fire that it would burn before anyone had the chance to read it, which was, essentially, what happened.

Finnity, then, edited—it wasn’t the book yet, just a manuscript—handed, manhandled it, back to me. The edits had to be argued about, debated. I was incensed, I recensed, reedited in a manner that reoriginated my intentions, then when it was all recompleted and done again and my prose and so my sanity intact I passed the ms. back to Finnity who sent it to production (Rod?), who turned it into proofs he sent to Finnity who printed and sent them to me, who recorrected them again, subtracting a word here, adding a chapter there, before returning them to Finnity who sent them to a copyeditor (Henry?), who copyedited and/or proofread them (Henri?), then sent them to production (Rod?), who after inputting the changes had galleys printed and bound with the cover art (photograph of a synagogue outside Chełm converted into a granary, 1941, Anonymous, © United States Holocaust Museum), the jacket/frontflap copy I wrote myself, not to mention the bio, which I wrote myself too, and the publicity photo for the backflap (© I. Raúl Lindsay), which I posed for, hands in frontpockets moody, within a tenebrous archway of the Manhattan Bridge. All that, including the blurbs obtained from Elie Wiesel and Dr. Ruth Westheimer, being sent out to the critics four months before date of publication (by Kimi! my publicist!), four months commonly considered enough time for critics to read it or not and prose their own hatreds, meaning that galleys, softcover, were posted in spring, mine delivered around the middle of May—tripping over that package left in my vestibule by a courier either lazy or trusting—though I held a finished copy only in mid-August—after I insisted on nitpicking through the text once again in the hopes of hyphen-removal—when Aar sent to Ridgewood two paramedics who stripped off their uniforms to practice CPR on each other, then gave me a defibrillatory lapdance and a deckled hardcover.

Every September the city has that nervy crisp air, that new season briskness: new films in the theaters where after a season of explosions serious black and white actors have sex against the odds and subplot of a crumbling apartheid regime, the new concert season led by exciting new conductors with wild floppy hair and big capped teeth premiering new repertoire featuring the debuts of exciting new soloists of obscure nationalities (an Ashkenazi/Bangladeshi pianist accompanying a fiery redheaded Indonesian violinist in Fiddler on the Hurūf), new galleries with new exhibitions of unwieldy mixedmedia installations (Climate Change Up: a cloud seeded with ballot chad), new choreography on new themes (La danse des tranches, ou pas de derivatives), new plays on and off Broadway featuring TV actresses seeking stage cred to relaunch careers playing characters dying of AIDS or dyslexia.

September’s also the time of new books coming out, of publication parties held at new lounges, new venues. Which was why on that freefloating Monday after Labor Day, with the city returned to itself rested and tanned, my publisher gathered my friends, frenemies, writers, in the type of emerging neighborhood that magazines and newspapers were always underpaying them to christen.

Understand, on my first visits to NY the Village had just been split between East and West. SoHo went, so there had to be NoHo. When I first moved to the city the realestate pricks were scamming the editors into helping reconfigure the outerboroughs too, turning Brooklyn, flipping Queens, for zilch in return, only the displacement of minorities despite their majority. At the time of my party, Silicon Alley had just been projected along Broadway, in glassed steel atop the Flatiron—each new shadow of each new tower being foreshadowed initially in language (sarcastic language).

Interviews

Barnes & Noble Review Interview with Joshua Cohen

Joshua Cohen's new novel, The Book of Numbers, is an essential cultural document about life in the digital age. It concerns the founding of a fictional search engine company, Tetration.com, and the complicated business arrangement struck between one of Tetration's founders, Joshua Cohen — in the book referred to as Principal — with his ghost biographer, a frustrated writer Joshua Cohen:

Did you mean Joshua Cohen? The genius, googolionaire, Founder and CEO of Tetration.com, as of now datestamped 8/27, timecoded 22:12 Central European Summer Time — hits #1 through #324 for "Joshua Cohen" on tetration.com.

Or Joshua Cohen? The failed novelist, poet, screenwriter, husband and son, pro journalist, speechwriter, and ghostwriter, as of now — datestamed 8/28, timecoded 00:14 Gulf Standard Time — hit #325 "my" highest ranking on Tetration.com.
The Book of Numbers is a challenging novel that moves at varying speeds, constantly shape-shifting and adopting new voices. There are sections that embrace the chattiness of a confessional blog, the sloppy syntax of an unedited email, and the big-picture ruminations that one might expect from a writer like Robert Musil or Don DeLillo. Anyone interested in the sociocultural forces that encourage people to live out loud — i.e., to share ever-larger pieces of their lives with the world, so that such data can be monetized and transformed into corporate profits — should read this book.

Full disclosure: I first met Joshua seven years ago and, like many, I've been deeply impressed by his enormous output. Joshua is the author of eight books — four story collections and four novellas — that include Witz (2010), an 817-page novel about the last Jew on earth, and Four New Messages (2012), a collection of short stories about the uncomfortable intersection between online and offline life.

On the occasion of the publication of The Book of Numbers, I asked him to take a few minutes to talk with me about the novel and his inspirations. The following interview was conducted via email. —Christopher Byrd

The Barnes & Noble Review: How did you come to literature — as a reader and as a writer? Were there detours? Were you ever a comic book nerd or a science fiction buff?

Joshua Cohen: Books were in my family — books were my family. But this isn't the place to go into the history of the Jews. . . . As for comics — no, never: in my house, we abominated the Image. But as for science fiction, absolutely. In The Book of Numbers, I make Principal's favorites my own: Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, Avram Davidson (who also wrote some wonderful crime stories). I'm not sure why I didn't also mention Dick and Lem, and from among the living: Le Guin, Delaney, Gene Wolfe, and Barry Malzberg.

BNR: I've always liked Derrida's formulation that literature "is the end of the family" or the place where one is absolved of the need for politeness. What does "literature" mean to you?

JC: Did Derrida say that? When/where? I know that line, or a line like that, from an interview with Philip Roth, which I read again, years later, in the book he was quoting from, a memoir by Czesław Miłosz: "When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished." And I seem to remember — I won't search this up — something similar in a letter from, or to, Freud. And that's what literature means to me. . . .

BNR: You write, "Another lesson: 'subject' and 'genre' are distinctions necessary for shelving a book, but necessarily ruinous distinctions for writing a book deserving of shelving." What's the state of your bookcases these days?

JC: Cases? Who do you think I am? Try piles, stacks, heaps, middens. Not just unalphabetized — dealphabetized. Dust jackets on the wrong spines. Paperbacks wetted, wadded, stuck together.

BNR: How promiscuous are you in your aesthetic taste, in general? Aside from books, what gets your neurons hopping?

JC: Vocabulary — words — the fact that our neurons are typically said to "fire," but now I have your "hop," and suddenly the skull's packed again — not with assassins anymore but with rabbits. And I'm as promiscuous as a rabbit, too, beyond literature: I like music, visual art, junk, and lists. I like filling out strangers' dating profiles. Smoking OK. Drinking OK. No pets.

BNR: You once told me that Saul Bellow was the only American novelist in recent memory that you wish you could have met. Why?

JC: I'm not sure why I said I would've liked to have met him. He doesn't seem to have been kind, or generous. Maybe I would've liked to try and withstand him — to stand beneath him, that is, and stick out whatever education he'd deign to impart. It's something like when I was a kid, in Israel: the bet I had with a friend regarding which of us could stay in the Dead Sea the longest — which of us could stay underwater the longest, which is difficult with all that salt, because salt just tries to get you floating, to get you out. I forget who won — but I remember who lost: we both did. A small amount of that sea might be good for the complexion, but for the wade we had, we had these stinging blotchy rashes, for weeks.

BNR: When did you begin work on The Book of Numbers?

JC: 2010 or so, in earnest. Between finishing Witz and beginning the last two of my Four New Messages.

BNR: Early in the book, you say, "I'm trying to work in something about the future of identity, something about names linking, or mislinking." Can you walk me through its initial conception? Was the book born out of a question, an anecdote, an intimation?

JC: It came from being surrounded by Joshua Cohens. Or Joshuas Cohen. From getting their mail — but more, from getting their email. And having to fwd: having to introduce "myself."

Then, I had this side business, or barely a business, more like a subndash;side hobby, liquidating synagogue libraries: Large urban synagogues — whose congregants had died, or aged out to Florida or the Southwest, or just moved with their children and grandchildren to the suburbs — were deaccessioning their collections of both holy and secular books, and I was driving around Jersey in a U-Haul, picking up that stock, trucking it back to my apartment. I donated a few volumes, sold even fewer, wound up keeping most for myself — including a Hebrew copy of the biblical Book of Numbers that, according to its title page stamp, had belonged to a man named Yehoshuah Kohen — Joshua Cohen. This Cohencidence led me to read through the book again, for the first time since my school days, and it was through this rereading that I recovered the desert: the forty years of wandering during which the enslaved generation dies out, to make way for the shiny new youth to inherit the future. I realized, this was the divide I was dealing with — peddling the books I grew up with for nothing online.

BNR: Also early on, you note, "All books have to be researched, but readable books have their research buried." I was deeply impressed by the reams of technical information regarding the development and refinement of Tetration's search engine and by your mastery of Silicon Valley lingo, which struck me as fanciful until I read the profile of Marc Andreessen in The New Yorker. What surprised you during the course of your research for the book? Were there any specific areas relating to the maturation of the Internet that were particularly difficult for you to get a handle on? Any archival anecdotes that you would like to share?

JC: Nothing difficult in the conception, a number of things difficult in the execution: how to write clearly about math — about physics — about numbers. How to render not just the ideas but also my characters' feelings for ideas — and how to render characters constitutionally discomfited by "feelings." I'm not sure what I was surprised by, at this remove, nor can I much differentiate between material I researched and material I invented. Wait — I'm having a flashback. . . . I remember being taken by the '60s and '70s, by the way the American counterculture evolved a worldwide digital consumer culture. That's a major subject I only grazed in the book.

BNR: There are countless passages in the book that I love, but the one I find most inspiring as a writer is this: "A History of Frankfurt noted only that the hotel was subsequently rebuilt [after World War II] but never addressed how or why it was rebuilt — though perhaps such questions are only for outsiders, or retrospect. Because it seems to me that standing amid the rubble you have a choice. You can rebuild, or you can not rebuild, and if you decide to rebuild then you will rebuild the thing exactly as it was or will you make it new. Either you can go get the exact same masonry and the exact same woods and the semblant rugs and the Aryan Atlas figures that uphold the pediment with your name done up in vermeil, to make as faithful a replica as feasible of what you've lost, or else you can just hit reset and find an alternate design — other materials — and maybe not even a hotel . . . the questions of whether to make, or not to make, of whether to remake or make new, are just as germane to literature." Given that we live in an age far removed from the early and mid-twentieth century where the novel's cultural primacy was at its high-water mark, what keeps the literary flame burning deep inside of you? What do you want from a new book these days? What sclerotic literary forms, if any, do you think should be chucked overboard?

JC: To start with, chuck no forms. Everything we keep, will keep us. What do I want from a book? Something protean, something always on-the-move-or-make — shape-shifting, semantically-and-syntactically-shifting. There's that hoariest cliché: over the course of a book, the characters must change — but what about the form, what about style? Why is everything else just assumed to be static? As for what keeps the literary flame burning? I'm guessing it's oil. That's why we invade sovereign nations, isn't it? So that we'll always have something to write about, or write against?

BNR: David Foster Wallace once said that Nabokov is the father that has to be killed. Are there any paternal figures that you wish to slay?

JC: I'm from Atlantic City. Maybe, Donald Trump?

July 6, 2015

From the B&N Reads Blog

Customer Reviews