On the Nature of Human Romantic Interaction

Winner of the Paris Review Discovery Prize for best first fiction and anthologized in The Best American Short Stories 2002, Karl Iagnemma has been recognized as a writer of rare talent. His literary terrain is the world of science, with its charged boundary between the rational mind and the restless heart.

In Iagnemma’s stories, mathematicians and theoreticians, foresters and doctors, yearn to create bonds as steadfast as the equations and principles that anchor their lives. A frustrated academic tries to diagram his troubled relationship with his girlfriend but fails to create a formula for romance. A nineteenth-century phrenologist must reexamine the connection between knowledge and passion when a young con-woman beats him at his own game. A jaded professor dreams endlessly of his two obsessions: a beautiful former colleague and the theorem that made her famous.

Inventive, wise, funny, and disquieting, Karl Iagnemma’s first collection attests to his spirited imagination and his prodigious literary gifts.


From the eBook edition.