Cohen - Book of Numbers

To sum this up in Web terms, hell make you want to be an angel investor in his stuff. Whats a book but a public offering? Youll want to be in on the ground floor.

The New York Times

Intelligent, lyrical, prosaic, theoretical, pragmatic, funny, serious [Cohens] 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

In Mr. Cohens hands, a meme is a matter of life and death, because he goes from the reality we all knowthe link, the clickto the one we tend to forget: the human. Mr. Cohen is ambitious. He is mapping terra incognita.

The New York Observer

[Cohen has] manifold talents at digging under and around absurdity. The reward is an off-kilter precision, one that feels both untainted and unique.

Rachel Kushner, author of The Flamethrowers

Like [David Foster] Wallace, Cohen is clearly concerned with the depersonalizing effects of technology, broken people doing depraved things, and how the two intersect in tragic (and, sometimes, hilarious) ways.

The Boston Globe

What dazzles here is a Pynchonesque verbal dexterity, the sonic effect of exotic vocabulary, terraced sentences, robust puns and metaphors, and edgy, Tarantino-like dialogue.

Review of Contemporary Fiction

Cohen packs whole histories and destructions, maps and traditions, into single sentences. He employs lists, codes, and invented syntax with the sure hand of a visionary, his prowess and passion further emboldened by a boundless sense of scope.

The Believer

There is ample evidence that Joshua Cohen is one of the greatest literary minds of his generation.

Flavorpill

Book of Numbers is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters with the exception of some well-known real-life figures, are products of the authors imagination and are not to be construed as real. Where real-life figures appear, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are entirely fictional and are not intended to depict actual events or to change the entirely fictional nature of the work. In all other respects, any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

Copyright 2015 by Joshua Cohen

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

R ANDOM H OUSE and the H OUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

ISBN 978-0-8129-9691-3
eBook ISBN 978-0-8129-9692-0

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

www.atrandom.com

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Book design by Simon M. Sullivan

v3.1

But as for you, your carcases, they shall fall in this wilderness. And your children shall wander in the wilderness forty years, and bear your whoredoms, until your carcases be wasted in the wilderness. After the number of days in which ye searched the land, even forty days, each day for a year, shall ye bear your iniquities, even forty years, and ye shall know my breach of promise.

NUMBERS 14:3234, KING JAMES VERSION

And your corpses you will fall in this desert. And your children will be of shepherds in the desert 40 years and will support your prostitution/adultery until the perfection/destruction of your corpses in the desert. In the number of days you searched the land 40 days the day to the year the day to the year you will support your poverty/violation 40 years and you will know my opposition/pretext.

NUMBERS 14:3234, TRANSLATION BY TETRANS.TETRATION.COM/#HEBREW/ENGLISH

I f youre reading this on a screen, fuck off. Ill only talk if Im gripped with both hands.

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

The paperback was compromise enough. And thats what Ive 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 hereHitlers 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 Rennesbooks Im using as models, paragons of what to avoid.

Im writing a memoir, of coursehalf bio, half autobio, it feelsIm writing the memoir of a man not me.

It begins in a resort, a suite.

Im 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 Id kept the eyemask and earplugs from the jet, I wouldnt even have to describe this, theres 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 isnt quite a hotel. Its a cemetery for people both deceased and on vacation, who still check in daily with work.

As for yours truly, Ive 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 upwith my employers technologymyself, and Rach.

My wife, my ex, my x2b.

\

Living by the check, by the logliving remotely, capitalhopping, skipping borders, jumping timezones, yet always with that equatorial chain of blinking beeping messages to maintain, what Principal calls the conversationit gets lonely.

For the both of us.

Making tours of the local offices, or just of overpriced museums to live in. Claridges, Htel 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 youre writing the principal and mine is basically the internet, the webthats how hes positioned, thats how hes 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 Ive dedicated my life to. Though dont 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), hes feeling the urge to put his life down in writing, into writing on paper.