On a sweltering day in July 2023, a ragtag group of data wonks sat around a table at U Zlatého Tygra, or the Golden Tiger, a historic bar in Prague’s Old Town. A mild sense of outrage hung in the air between jokes about who among them looked the most Medieval. The group was discussing the issue of manipulated images and fabricated data in scientific publishing. Soon someone was passing around a phone showing a black-and-white image with clear traces of tampering. After a couple more rounds, the group made its way across the ornate cobblestone roads. They brimmed with frustration that, until now, had largely been shared only online. “It’s a toxic dump,” an Italian scientist known to the group by his pseudonym, Aneurus Inconstans, said about science. “It’s not about curiosity anymore, it’s just a career.”
These are the sleuths, as the media often refer to them. They are a haphazard collection of international acquaintances, some scientists and some not, from the United States, Ukraine, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere, who are dedicated to uncovering potential manipulation in the scientific literature.
It would be easy to call Rejection an “incel novel” — especially because it starts with a man who’s denied sex by nearly every woman he pursues. That label would tell you how angry these characters are, how vain their efforts, how stunted their worldviews. It summons their yearning and guarantees their failure. But the seven interlocked stories in this book, the second by Tony Tulathimutte, go deeper and fouler than inceldom. In Rejection, sexual failure is only the fruiting body; self-hatred, nihilism, and shame are the mycelium that makes the fungus grow.
Elizabeth Strout packs more empathy onto a single page than most writers scatter throughout an entire book. Her fiction is filled with the scarred and the scared, good parents and bad, perpetrators and survivors, sinners and what she calls “sin-eaters.” Many of her characters are chronically lonely and emotionally fragile. Some are curmudgeons, gossips, narcissists, and bullies. The wonder is that she makes our hearts go out to all of them.
In fact, Strout loves her characters so much that she keeps going back to them.
“Tell me everything” is a credo of sorts, a statement of the writer’s voracious need to know, to solve the human case. But that Strout’s oblique approach to matters of the heart works so well is partly due to her judicious use of silence and omission to suggest the complexity of our closest connections.
You don’t read Kushner for the “relatability” of her characters or even, particularly, for what happens in her novels. Instead, she draws readers in with her dead-on language and the yellow-tipping-to-orange threat-alert atmosphere of the worlds she imagines.
If you’re someone who tends to overthink novels, you may not like this one; it leaves a lot of questions that don’t get answered. But if you’re up for a thrill-ride of a novel, “The Fallen Fruit” is a gem. A speculative fiction fan will go head over heels for it.
What is important in life? What gives it purpose, and meaning? While philosophers ponder these questions, dogs just live them. In his new book, Mark Rowlands argues the case that a dog’s capacity for joy, for meaning, for wholesale commitment to being, far exceeds that of humans. A professor of philosophy and a serial dog owner, Rowlands has written a profound and funny examination of what it means to be fulfilled, both for canines and humans. By the end, you will envy your dog’s every waking moment.