Alexandra Alter, writing for The New York Times:

“The world made this book true while I was writing it, which of course is the paranoid’s greatest fantasy,” he said, smoking a cigarette and sipping a glass of grapefruit juice in his small basement apartment in Red Hook, Brooklyn, one morning. “The question now is not, ‘Is this true,’ but, ‘How can we live with it?’ ”

The lede of the NYT’s review of ‘Book of Numbers’ is what initially hooked me:

Alive with talk and dense with data, Joshua Cohen’s novel “Book of Numbers” reads as if Philip Roth’s work were fired into David Foster Wallace’s inside the Hadron particle collider.

But reading the first couple of chapters yesterday is what bumped it to the front of my to-read list.

Joe Stracci