How I Won A Nobel Prize

Helen, a graduate student on a path to solve high temperature superconductivity and thereby save the planet, is one of the best minds of her generation. When her irreplaceable advisor's student sex scandal is exposed, she must choose whether to give up on her work or accompany him to RIP, a research institute off the Connecticut coast which grants safe harbour to professors that other institutions and society have sent packing. Founded by a nefarious billionaire, RIP is a libertarian, libertine dream, a place where the disgraced and deplorable operate at the top of their fields with impunity and, indeed, every comfort.

Unwilling to abandon her work, Helen decides to join her advisor at RIP, bringing along her partner, Hew, who is deeply uncomfortable about being there. As she settles into life at the institute, Helen develops a crush on an iconoclastic older novelist, while Hew gets involved in an increasingly violent protest movement, the rift between them deepening until both face major--and potentially world-altering--choices. Impudent, wise, anchored in character, and provocative without being polemical, How I Won A Nobel Prize approaches our contemporary moral confusion in a genuine and fresh way, examining the price we're willing pay for progress, the ways we all hedge our ethics, and what it means, in the end, to be a good person.

Taranto’s hilarious, provocative debut novel, is at once bracingly contemporary and reassuringly familiar . . . The novel’s peculiar genius lies in how you’re never entirely sure where Taranto’s sympathies lie. The Times A debut of great skill and admirable complexity The Observer A punchy and very funny campus novel which manages to satirise the culture wars without ever making too clear which side of the cancel-culture v anti-woke divide the author stands on -- Nicola Sturgeon A hit, a very palpable hit The Spectator A first-class debut . . . [a] masterful satire . . . quite brilliant The Irish Times A twisty satire with nerve and sass . . . [An] addictive page-turner The Mail Outstanding The Wall Street Journal Razor sharp . . . bracingly clever . . . a viciously funny page-turner with plenty of surprises up its sleeve Vogue A gleefully irreverent satire of so-called cancel culture, virtue signaling, and early-21st-century hypocrisy. The Atlantic Witty and provocative . . . Taranto understands the appeal of bad-man geniuses, and he understands their dangers, too. -- Vox, 'Best Books of 2023' Very funny. Very good -- B.J. Novak With How I Won A Nobel Prize Julius Taranto achieves the near-impossible: a literary comedy about cancel culture that is neither priggish nor self-satisfiedly transgressive, less about culture wars than the neverending battle of being human. A novel of ideas in the tradition of Norman Rush's Mating, How I Won A Nobel Prize is one of the best new novels I've read in years. -- Tara Isabella Burton, author of Social Creature A wildly original debut . . . Can a high-powered male lawyer write a propulsive, smart, funny novel about science, cancel culture, and #MeToo with a female protagonist? Absolutely. It’s exactly what Julius Taranto has done in his debut, How I Won A Nobel Prize. Publishers Weekly A high-wire act, balancing savvy political satire with brilliant character development and prose that sings and guffaws with nuance Shelf Awareness Julius Taranto does an incredible job crafting an ambitious and nuanced narrative abut "cancel culture" that'll keep you laughing from start to finish. Coveteur A stunning new talent, announcing itself fully formed -- Jonathan Lethem, author of Motherless Brooklyn

Julius Taranto's fiction has appeared in Phoebe, The Fiddleback, Palimpsest, and Connu. His essay "On Outgrowing David Foster Wallace," in the Los Angeles Review of Books, was one of its most-read articles of the year. He has also written for The Chronicle of Higher Education, Foreign Affairs, and Lawfare. He is an editorial consultant for McNally Editions, the McNally Jackson paperback line, and in his other career is an antitrust lawyer.

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