A "very funny, very good" (B. J. Novak) debut novel about a graduate student who follows her disgraced mentor to a university that gives safe harbor to scholars of ill repute, igniting a crisis of work and a test of her conscience (and marriage)
Helen is one of the brightest minds of her generation: a young physicist on a path to solve high-temperature superconductivity (which could save the planet). When she discovers that her brilliant adviser is involved in a sex scandal, Helen is torn: should she give up on her work with him? Or should she accompany him to a controversial university, founded by a provocateur billionaire, that hosts academics other schools have thrown out?
Helen decides she must go—her work is too important. She brings along her partner, Hew, who is much less sanguine about living on an island where the disgraced and deplorable get to operate with impunity. On campus, Helen finds herself drawn to an iconoclastic older novelist, while Hew stews in an increasingly radical protest movement. Their rift deepens until both confront choices that will reshape their lives—and maybe the world.
Irreverent, generous, anchored in character, and provocative without being polemical, How I Won a Nobel Prize illuminates the compromises we’ll make for progress, what it means to be a good person, and how to win a Nobel Prize. Turns out all of it would be simple—if you could run the numbers.
Genre: Literary Fiction
Helen is one of the brightest minds of her generation: a young physicist on a path to solve high-temperature superconductivity (which could save the planet). When she discovers that her brilliant adviser is involved in a sex scandal, Helen is torn: should she give up on her work with him? Or should she accompany him to a controversial university, founded by a provocateur billionaire, that hosts academics other schools have thrown out?
Helen decides she must go—her work is too important. She brings along her partner, Hew, who is much less sanguine about living on an island where the disgraced and deplorable get to operate with impunity. On campus, Helen finds herself drawn to an iconoclastic older novelist, while Hew stews in an increasingly radical protest movement. Their rift deepens until both confront choices that will reshape their lives—and maybe the world.
Irreverent, generous, anchored in character, and provocative without being polemical, How I Won a Nobel Prize illuminates the compromises we’ll make for progress, what it means to be a good person, and how to win a Nobel Prize. Turns out all of it would be simple—if you could run the numbers.
Genre: Literary Fiction
Praise for this book
"Such a delightful surprise! A refreshing literary cocktail that takes the right kinds of chances at this chancy moment." - Kurt Andersen
"Julius Taranto achieves the near-impossible: a literary comedy about cancel culture that is neither priggish nor self-satisfiedly transgressive, less about culture wars than the never-ending battle of being human. A novel of ideas in the tradition of, Norman Rush's Mating, How I Won a Nobel Prize is one of the best new novels I've read in years." - Tara Isabella Burton
"Playful, taunting, and incisive, How I Won A Nobel Prize is a feat of wit, toying with the systems and classifications of our times to arrive at something brilliantly uncategorizable." - Charmaine Craig
"This is serious fiction of the least self-serious kind. A brilliantly executed, uproarious, and unabashedly precise exploration of ambition, power, love, and the painful art of balancing what we owe one another and ourselves." - Lindsay Stern
"An indisputably brilliant comic novel of ideas, a feat of deep research and Olympian satire worthy of Don DeLillo. Julius Taranto confidently grasps the third rail of cancel culture and ties it into a balloon animal, with great nerve and heart (to say nothing of phlegm, bile, and blood - in other words, humor). Reading this book is like doing a whippit that makes you smarter." - Tony Tulathimutte
"Julius Taranto achieves the near-impossible: a literary comedy about cancel culture that is neither priggish nor self-satisfiedly transgressive, less about culture wars than the never-ending battle of being human. A novel of ideas in the tradition of, Norman Rush's Mating, How I Won a Nobel Prize is one of the best new novels I've read in years." - Tara Isabella Burton
"Playful, taunting, and incisive, How I Won A Nobel Prize is a feat of wit, toying with the systems and classifications of our times to arrive at something brilliantly uncategorizable." - Charmaine Craig
"This is serious fiction of the least self-serious kind. A brilliantly executed, uproarious, and unabashedly precise exploration of ambition, power, love, and the painful art of balancing what we owe one another and ourselves." - Lindsay Stern
"An indisputably brilliant comic novel of ideas, a feat of deep research and Olympian satire worthy of Don DeLillo. Julius Taranto confidently grasps the third rail of cancel culture and ties it into a balloon animal, with great nerve and heart (to say nothing of phlegm, bile, and blood - in other words, humor). Reading this book is like doing a whippit that makes you smarter." - Tony Tulathimutte
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