On the Nature of Human Romantic Interaction
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- $5.99
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
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 sustain 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The meticulousness of science and mathematics is applied to the mysteries of love in Iagnemma's debut collection, which features eight complex, multilayered stories in which protagonists try to balance the demands of the heart against their need for rational, orderly thinking. The title story introduces a young academic who tries to formulate a series of mathematical equations he can use to force his willful, libidinous girlfriend to make a commitment to him. Some of the stories are period pieces. In "The Phrenologist's Dream," a 19th-century phrenologist falls in love with a former female client who seduces him and then makes off with his valuable set of skulls. In "Zilkowski's Theorem," a pair of Boston mathematicians vie for the attention of the same woman, then end up betting their professional future on the outcome of a Red Sox game. An idealistic, creative young couple find their dreams humorously compromised in "The Confessional Approach," one of the few stories that abandons the science theme; impending poverty forces the couple to sell the woman's finely crafted wooden mannequins to the owner of a shooting range, where they become targets for gun hobbyists. Elegant, witty and concise, Iagnemma's stories precisely capture the hopelessly imprecise nature of love.
