It’ll look, more or less, like this. Right now, I’m going through the copy edits. Out at the end of August.
The Mathematician’s Shiva
A Novel
Stuart Rojstaczer
A comic, bittersweet tale of family evocative of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union and Everything Is Illuminated
Alexander “Sasha” Karnokovitch and his family would like to mourn the passing of his mother, Rachela, with modesty and dignity. But Rachela, a famous Polish émigré mathematician and professor at the University of Wisconsin, is rumored to have solved the million-dollar, Navier-Stokes Millennium Prize problem. Rumor also has it that she spitefully took the solution to her grave. To Sasha’s chagrin, a ragtag group of socially challenged mathematicians arrives in Madison and crashes the shiva, vowing to do whatever it takes to find the solution—even if it means prying up the floorboards for Rachela’s notes.
Written by a Ph.D. geophysicist, this hilarious and multi-layered debut novel brims with colorful characters and brilliantly captures humanity’s drive not just to survive, but to solve the impossible.
• A Penguin Original
• Stuart Rojstaczer has written about education for the New York Times and the Washington Post, and his scientific articles have been published in numerous journals, including Science and Nature
• Rojstaczer drew on the experiences of his parents, Jewish immigrants who survived the Holocaust, to give depth to his characters’ backgrounds
• For fans of Michael Chabon, Jonathan Safran Foer, Gary Shteyngart, and Aleksandar Hemon
Author’s website: stuartr.com
Stuart Rojstaczer was raised in Milwaukee and has degrees from the University of Wisconsin, the University of Illinois, and Stanford. For many years, he was a professor of geophysics at Duke University. He lives in northern California.
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