The Fact Checker

Mirthful, laugh-out-loud funny, and surprisingly philosophical, The Fact Checker is a brilliant debut novel featuring a missing woman who might be perfectly fine, and a single-minded investigator yearning for meaning, morality, and accuracy in an increasingly post-truth world.

It's just a puff piece about a farmer's market, I said to myself. It's not going to kill anyone.

It started out like any other morning for the Fact Checker. The piece, "Mandeville/Green," didn't raise any red flags. There were more pressing stories that week--it being 2004 New York City and all.

"Mandeville/Green" was a light, breezy look at a local farm called New Egypt, whose Ramapo tomatoes were quickly becoming the summer's hottest produce. At first glance, the story seemed straightforward, but one line made the Fact Checker pause: a stray quote from a New Egypt volunteer named Sylvia making a cryptic reference to "nefarious business" at the farmer's market. "People sell everything here," she's alleged to have said. "It ain't all green."

When Sylvia abruptly disappears the morning after an unexpectedly long night with the Fact Checker, he becomes obsessed with finding her. Did Sylvia discover something unsavory about New Egypt or its messianic owner? Is it possible she had some reason to fear for her safety? Or was it simply something the Fact Checker said?

Striking the perfect balance of humor, wonder, sadness, and poignancy, Austin Kelley's debut novel takes readers on a quixotic quest from one hidden corner of New York City to another--from an underground supper club in the Financial District to an abandoned-boat-turned-anarchist-community-space on the Gowanus Canal. As the story develops, the Fact Checker begins to question his perception of what's real and what's not. Facts can be deceiving, after all, and if you aren't careful, you might miss the truth right in front of your eyes.

"[The Fact Checker] is a sprightly hyperlocal caper that is also, intentionally or not, a Notes and Comment on the fragile state of urban intellectual masculinity." --Alexandra Jacobs, New York Times

"[The Fact Checker] raise[s] some of the most relevant questions du jour: What is a fact? What is truth? And who gets to decide?" --Ilana Masad, Los Angeles Times

"One thing is for sure: Kelley's comedic hero is a chronic, self-sabotaging overthinker and, less amusingly, an overdrinker. "The Fact Checker" lands as a clever caper not just about sometimes elusive truths, but also about "the paralysis of encyclopedic doubt." . . . By engaging with what the author calls "thickets of untruth," this book could not be more timely." --Heller McAlpin, Christian Science Monitor

"Kelley's novel is less in the lineage of McInerney and more in the tradition of another facts-obsessed writer from New York: Thomas Pynchon. . . Like Kelley's novel, Pynchon's book arrived during a tumultuous time in America, one where intense polarization had damaged the nation's fundamental sense of the truth. . . . The Fact Checker [is] a book that is intensely aware of its time. Perhaps we need more subtle comedies like this to help us comprehend what has happened to the truth." --Nick Ripatrazone, The Bulwark

"Wonderful . . . a romp . . . this is a novel with both soul and humor, and it will never make you yearn to be a fact-checker. Unless you want your heart broken."--Jim Kelly, Air Mail Editor's Picks

"In his sort-of-mystery debut, with understated humor and zippy prose, former New Yorker fact-checker Kelley is a fluid and funny writer, divertingly digressing on the nature of fact-checking and filling out a backstory for the narrating fact-checker, who, both well-informed and hilariously unaware, is as charmingly pedantic as a character could be."--Annie Bostrom, Booklist

"Kelley's debut is poignant, funny, and full of the quirky characters that make life interesting."--Joanna M. Burkhardt, Library Journal

"A bravura debut."--Kirkus Reviews

"Kelley's droll and pithy narration propels the story, as does the impressive plotting.... Readers will be swept up."--Publishers Weekly

"Austin Kelly has written a quirky, funny, smart novel about one of the weirder publishing jobs in New York. His protagonist seems to be a much better fact checker than I ever was, dogged and meticulous, though that doesn't ultimately save him from his own human impulses." --Jay McInerney, author of Bright Lights, Big City

"What a joy it is to follow the Fact Checker on his journey to learn the truth (in the era that launched truthiness) about suspicious activity at an organic farmer's market. Really, he's looking for a girl, and what he finds is so much more and less and deliciously other than expected. "You never know, when you are picking and poking, what will ooze and leave a stain," the Fact Checker tells us. It's one reliable truth in this darkly funny urban epic that serves up earnest innocence and clear-eyed cynicism in equal measure, and captivates to the very end." --Laura Sims, author of Looker and How Can I Help You

"In an age of disinformation and deepfakes, here comes a slyly unassuming novel about the nature of truth and what really matters. The Fact Checker is a propulsive mystery about heirloom tomatoes, a missing woman, or slipshod journalism: take your pick. It's also a moving portrait of what it's like to be young and in love with the city, and the obsessions--and doubt--it can inspire." --Ben McGrath, author of Riverman: An American Odyssey

"The Fact Checker begins like it's going to be a conventional mystery story before turning into something much wilder and more original that questions the nature of how we really know what's true and what isn't. It's as if Martin Scorsese's film Afterhours ran into Adaptation at a bar and convinced it to go for an adventure. I read The Fact Checker in a flash, enjoyed the hell out of it, and woke up still thinking about it the next day." --Peter Blauner, New York Times bestselling author of The Intruder and Picture in the Sand

Austin Kelley is a former New Yorker fact checker. As a journalist he has written for The New York Times, The Nation, Slate, The Wall Street Journal, and The New Yorker. He has a Ph.D. from Duke University, and now teaches writing at NYU. The Fact Checker is his first novel.

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