Joshua Cohen

J C

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.

Books by Joshua Cohen

A Cage Went in Search of a Bird

ATTENTION

Moving Kings

Book of Numbers

Books by Joshua Cohen published by New York Review Books

The Netanyahus

Books by Joshua Cohen published by Verso Books

Associations and Democracy

Author Q&A

PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE:When did you start dreaming up The Book of Numbers?

JOSHUA COHEN: The earliest Word doc dates to 2008, which means the earliest (handwritten) notebook would be circa 2007. Thank you Microsoft, thank you Apple, thank you Mead.

SIG: This eponymously named protagonist – what was your intention with naming him after yourself?

JC: My hope was to get at some truth, or some succedaneum for truth, underlying the notion of “identity,” as that’s been constituted both onscreen and off. Who are we in real life? Who are we online? And how do those two personas jibe, no question mark.

PRH:Who do you think is currently the most terrifying person in technology?

JC: Me, myself, I.

PRH: What’s the one thing technology can’t (as far as we know) do (yet) that you sorely wish it could?

JC: Write my books for me.

PRH: What books are on your nightstand?

JC: I don’t have a nightstand, I just have a mattress, and the mattress is on the floor. As for what’s on the floor: Looking at Pictures, a collection of Robert Walser’s art writing; Words Without Music, Philip Glass’s memoir; Joseph Roth, The Hotel Years; Clarice Lispector, The Complete Stories, and a volume of Talmud (Kiddushin 36A).