An incisive, refreshingly irreverent novel about a young physicist who finds herself exiled to an island research institute that gives safe harbour to 'cancelled' artists and academics, throwing her into crises of work, marriage and conscience.
Helen, a graduate student on a path to solve high-temperature superconductivity and thereby save the planet, is one of the best minds of her generation. When her irreplaceable advisor's student sex scandal is exposed, she must choose whether to give up on her work or accompany him to RIP, a research institute off the Connecticut coast, which grants safe harbour to professors that other institutions and society have sent packing. Founded by a nefarious billionaire, RIP is a libertarian, libertine dream, a place where the disgraced and deplorable operate at the top of their fields with impunity and, indeed, every comfort.
Unwilling to abandon her work, Helen decides to join her advisor at RIP, bringing along her partner, Hew, who is deeply uncomfortable about being there. As she settles into life at the institute, Helen develops a crush on an iconoclastic older novelist, while Hew gets involved in an increasingly violent protest movement, the rift between them deepening until both face major – and potentially world-altering – choices.
Impudent, wise, anchored in character and provocative without being polemical, Julius Taranto's How I Won A Nobel Prize approaches our contemporary moral confusion in a genuine and fresh way, examining the price we're willing to pay for progress, the ways we all hedge our ethics and what it means, in the end, to be a good person. Julius Taranto's fiction has appeared in Phoebe, The Fiddleback, Palimpsest, and Connu. His essay "On Outgrowing David Foster Wallace," in the Los Angeles Review of Books, was one of its most-read articles of the year. He has also written for The Chronicle of Higher Education, Foreign Affairs, and Lawfare. He is an editorial consultant for McNally Editions, the McNally Jackson paperback line, and in his other career is an antitrust lawyer. He has received a grant to the Key West Literary Seminar. He has attended the CRIT workshop, Yale Law School, and Pomona College, where he won the college's creative writing prizes. He lives in Brooklyn. A truly hilarious comic novel that, with astonishing wit and intelligence, skewers the burning issues of our times, from an extraordinary and original new voice.
