for giving The Mathematician’s Shiva a sweet shout out in Washington Jewish Week. I’m glad I gave him some summer reading joy. His review:

“I took a week off in June and actually did some rare fiction reading entirely for pleasure. One novel that is about to be published in paperback is The Mathematician’s Shiva, by Stuart Rojstaczer. As the title suggests, it’s a very Jewish story. An overflow crowd of elite mathematicians descends on Madison, Wis., to sit shiva for the finest female mathematician of her day. There is a lot of vodka, Jewish cooking, some family dysfunction repaired, some lechery, and a team project to solve a famous math problem. The characters are mostly postwar emigres from Communist Poland and Russia, so the generational setting is refreshingly different, more recent than in the novels of Philip Roth or the stories of I.B. Singer. Also, Rojstaczer is a retired Duke geophysicist who manages to make mathematics just accessible enough to readers of limited numeracy. It’s a fun read.”