Corbin College, Stato di New York, inverno del 1959. Ruben Blum, professore di storia, viene incaricato di guidare e accompagnare per un weekend uno studioso israeliano che l'università sta valutando di assumere: Ben-Zion Netanyahu, padre di quel Benjamin che alcuni decenni dopo diventerà primo ministro di Israele. L'incontro con la famiglia Netanyahu sconvolgerà la tranquilla esistenza di Ruben, costringendolo a tornare in contatto con le sue radici ebraiche più profonde, da cui per tutta la vita ha cercato di affrancarsi. Liberamente ispirato a una storia vera raccontata a Cohen dal famoso critico letterario Harold Bloom, "I Netanyahu" è un campus novel, una commedia dissacrante, una lezione di storia, una conferenza accademica, una polemica sul sionismo, una riflessione sui conflitti culturali e religiosi degli ebrei americani e sulle vulnerabilità dei discorsi identitari.

Dall'autore del Libro dei numeri, quattro racconti che catturano l'assurdità delle nostre vite nell'era di internet, ansiogene, brandizzate e digitalizzate. Mono, sfortunato spacciatore di coca nel campus di Princeton, viene ridicolizzato in un blog diventato virale. Un copywriter frustrato vede esaurirsi la propria vena creativa a causa di una certa parola, ubiqua e fagocitante, che proprio non riesce a scrivere. Un ex scrittore newyorkese riciclatosi professore universitario accetta un incarico nella provincia americana, coinvolgendo i suoi studenti in un assurdo progetto di rivalsa sulla città che l'ha esiliato. Un aspirante giornalista si lancia sulle tracce di una ragazza vista in un filmato porno, in un viaggio che lo porterà in un distorto Paese delle meraviglie in cui ciò che è finito online una sola volta, vive per sempre. Quattro racconti che mostrano cosa succede quando il virtuale colonizza il reale, cercando, come il mastodontico Libro dei numeri, di salvare la scrittura, l'arte, il sesso e sì, anche l'alienazione, dalla dilagante ossessione per i brand e la tecnologia.

Ouando Joshua Cohen, scrittore newyorchese fallito, viene contattato da Joshua Cohen, il misterioso fondatore della più importante azienda tecnologica del mondo, affinché gli faccia da ghostwriter per la sua autobiografia, non sa che l'impresa in cui sta per imbarcarsi lo renderà una pedina in un gioco molto più grande di quanto immagini. Dagli albori di internet all'11/09, passando per la Shoah, il Vietnam e l'avvento dei social network, il racconto dei due Joshua si intreccia in un alternarsi di geniali invenzioni e cocenti sconfitte, amicizie incrollabili e amori infelici, per diventare uno specchio duplice della vita ai tempi della rivoluzione digitale. In fondo, nel mondo post-Facebook, chi non può vantare almeno un avatar, un alter ego, un altro io? Memoir, thriller, allegoria biblica, dramma, commedia.

Israele, 2015. Veterani dell'ultima guerra di Gaza ad appena ventun anni, Yoav e Uri hanno terminato il servizio militare obbligatorio nelle forze militari israeliane. Durante il tradizionale anno di riposo e recupero decidono di trasferirsi a New York, dove cominciano a lavorare per un lontano cugino di Yoav: David King, ebreo, repubblicano per convenienza, orgoglioso patriota e titolare della ditta di traslochi King. I due amici faticano a ritrovare il passo della vita civile dopo gli orrori della guerra, anche perché il lavoro consiste principalmente nel buttare giù porte negli angoli più poveri del Bronx, di Brooklyn e del Queens, sbattere fuori casa gli inquilini morosi e confiscarne i beni. Difficile insomma per Yoav e Uri evitare una sinistra sovrapposizione tra il passato in Israele e il presente nella Grande Mela. E quella che comincia come un'attività tutto sommato innocua, anche se stranamente familiare (un'altra "occupazione"), si trasforma in una situazione carica di tensione, quando entra in scena un proprietario di casa in cerca di vendetta.

“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 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.

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.

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

In the 1930s Europe is tangoing to the tune of a new age, but in rural Czechoslovakia golden-haired Maryska dances to a rhythm all her own. Not even her husband, Francin the brewery manager, can control her as Maryska shocks the populace with her scandalous behavior, and incurs the disapproval of a sheltered little town that is blissfully unaware of the cataclysmic world events that are about to engulf it. As World War II draws to a close, Maryska and her neighbors appear to have survived unscathed, but the new Communist political order creates tensions that tear through the social fabric in previously unimaginable ways. The Little Town Where Time Stood Still is Bohumil Hrabal’s poignant, hilarious evocation of the passing of an era and the sweetness of love, lust, and life.

THE BOOK OF NUMBERS - COHEN JOSHUA - Random UK

While film and video has long been used within psychological practice, researchers and practitioners have only just begun to explore the benefits of film and video production as therapy. This volume describes a burgeoning area of psychotherapy which employs the art of filmmaking and digital storytelling as a means of healing victims of trauma and abuse. It explores the ethical considerations behind this process, as well as its cultural and developmental implications within clinical psychology. Grounded in clinical theory and methodology, this multidisciplinary volume draws on perspectives from anthropology, psychiatry, psychology, and art therapy which support the use and integration of film/video-based therapy in practice.

Edited by a team of four leading philosophers, The Norton Introduction to Philosophy introduces students to contemporary perspectives on major philosophical issues and questions. This text features an impressive array of readings, including 25 specially-commissioned essays by prominent philosophers. A student-friendly presentation, a handy format, and a low price make The Norton Introduction to Philosophy as accessible and affordable as it is up-to-date.

The long-awaited final work and magnum opus of one of the United States’s greatest authors, critics, and tastemakers, In Partial Disgrace is a sprawling self-contained trilogy chronicling the troubled history of a small Central European nation bearing certain similarities to Hungary—and whose rise and fall might be said to parallel the strange contortions taken by Western political and literary thought over the course of the twentieth century. More than twenty years in the making, and containing a cast of characters, breadth of insight, and degree of stylistic legerdemain to rival such staggering achievements as William H. Gass’s The Tunnel, Carlos Fuentes’s Terra Nostra, Robert Coover’s The Public Burning, or Péter Nádas’s Parallel Lives, In Partial Disgrace may be the last great work to issue from the generation that changed American letters in the ’60s and ’70s.

High school sophomore Danny excels at gymnastics but is bullied, like the rest of the gymnasts, by members of the football team, until an emotionally and physically scarred new student joins the football team and forms an unlikely friendship with Danny.

High school sophomore Danny excels at gymnastics but is bullied, like the rest of the gymnasts, by members of the football team, until an emotionally and physically scarred new student joins the football team and forms an unlikely friendship with Danny.