Both Cohen’s and Snowden’s gregariousness can shade into garrulousness their writing and speech teem with grandiosity and introspection, a combination that appeals to their admirers and grates on their critics. Cohen, who has published eleven books since 2005, has elicited comparisons to David Foster Wallace, Philip Roth, and Thomas Pynchon, expansive, digressive writers who, much like Snowden himself, have enjoyed praise, weathered backlashes, and garnered cult followings. It’s a bildungsroman crafted with the expert aid of a novelist.Įnlisting a noted fiction writer to tell his life story might strike casual observers as odd, but Snowden and Cohen are both obsessed with the ways in which tech has transformed self and society. Permanent Record isn’t just an internet-age manifesto or a screed about government overreach. Yet this book stands apart, not merely because of its author, but also because of its guiding hands. Snowden was also the subject of Laura Poitras’s documentary Citizenfour, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt played him as a moody antihero in Oliver Stone’s 2016 big-screen docudrama, simply titled Snowden. Since fleeing the United States in 2013, he has collaborated on Glenn Greenwald’s tell-all book No Place to Hide. The memoir is far from the first major project to showcase Snowden’s life and work.

To keep the project covert, even from Snowden’s many hard-core admirers, publishers had reportedly used code names in their internal documents, and at least one of his literary assistants traveled to visit him under a cover story.

That’s only because hardly anyone had heard about it before Snowden’s publisher, Macmillan, announced in August that it would go on sale in 20 countries on September 17, Constitution Day. Edward Snowden’s new memoir, Permanent Record, wasn’t eagerly anticipated.

Ed snowden permanent record