Stuart Rojstaczer

Scanned and sent to meet deadline. 273 other pages seem to be more or less perfect as is. Hoorah! Soon to be (well in five months, to be precise) at a bookstore near you. I’ll get one more peek, but just a peek, before it gets printed.

So far, all I’ve found are very minor glitches in the galleys. I’m 20 percent through. Break time. Off to give a couple of elephant seal tours.

And it’s available for pre-order on some web sites as well (support your local bookstore and wait awhile is my advice). Penguin doesn’t mess around. It works fast. The Goodreads listing is here.

Even the penguin looks happy about it. Don’t trust me. Trust the cover. The book is good.

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.

Very clean and easy on the eyes. I’ve got a beautiful cover, a clean layout, a paid for book tour, and a boat load of ARCs. From here on in whenever something good happens to this book, I’m going to follow the time tested practice of my mother and spit on the ground three times to keep evil away. Pooh. Pooh. Pooh.

“I like it!!!!” Daughter
“I love it!!!!” Agent
“Oooh! People are going to pick up the book and buy it just because of this cover.” Wife
“It’s beautiful!” Me, with a tear of joy in my eye.

I’ll post it when I get the version with the text.