5.8 /10 1 Votes
Language English Pages 592 Originally published 2015 Page count 592 Country United States of America | 2.9/5 Goodreads Publication date 2015 ISBN 978-0-8129-9691-3 Publisher Random House | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Media type Print (hardback & paperback) Similar Joshua Cohen books, Other books | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Book of Numbers, published in 2015, is a metafiction novel written by author Joshua Cohen. The novel is about a writer named Joshua Cohen who is contracted to ghostwrite the autobiography of a tech billionaire called Joshua Cohen. It was published by Random House, and released in 2015.
Contents
Reception
Some critics compared Cohen's writing favorably to that of Philip Roth and David Foster Wallace. Dwight Garner, writing for the New York Times, stated that the similarities with Roth come from "...[blending] slashing comedy with a brooding awareness of family, of the Old World, of prior claims on his soul." Adam Mars-Jones, writing in the London Review of Books, said about the novel, "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."
Development
Cohen wrote the novel before the Edward Snowden leaks, but the narrative predicts several of the government initiatives revealed by Snowden. Cohen read numerous books and treatises about the Internet's history and studied the biographies of technologists before and during the writing of the book.