Lives of the Scientists
or, How to Predict the End of the World
By Rivka Galchen
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, April 6, 2027
One of our most brilliant, acclaimed novelists turns to nonfiction with a mind-expanding, slyly humorous personal exploration of the scientific imagination.
In Lives of the Scientists: or, How to Predict the End of the World, Rivka Galchen offers a profound and playful exploration of the lives of scientists, the persistence of error, and the quixotic faith required to make sense of a turbulent reality. She finds both hope and warning—and many startling stories—in those who have devoted themselves to searching for the truth about our world, facing the unpredictable and the uncertain, and the occasional authoritarian leader.
Galchen’s father—a spacy, otherworldly meteorologist—sends her a box containing two oversize T-shirts (one with the image of Shakespeare, the other of Einstein) and a copy of Don Quixote. The riddle of the gift, received only weeks before his death at fifty-three, becomes the catalyst for a journey into the minor mysteries of individual lives. We encounter the tragic genius of Nikolai Vavilov, who sought to conquer famine only to die of starvation in a Soviet prison; the eccentric Lewis Fry Richardson, who imagined a "forecast factory" of 64,000 human computers to predict both weather and war; and Ignaz Semmelweis, the doctor who discovered that washing hands could save lives, only to be dismissed as a madman by his peers. Part memoir, part history, part political meditation, Lives of the Scientists spans everything from the "Infinite Hotel" of the mathematician David Hilbert to the "memory palace” of a man who could never forget. Science, Galchen discovers, is much like the knight-errantry of Don Quixote: a fantasy that works back to improve the reality we are trying to evade.
With the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist, Galchen bridges the gap between the "scuffle of the small" and the cosmic scale of the universe. Whether discussing the Semmelweis Reflex (humans’ tendency to irrationally reject the truth), the evolution of "Good Enough" mothers, or the "many worlds" of quantum physics where our lost dogs are still alive, she offers a "light to the soul"—a much-needed antidote to the blue light of our smartphones and their endless scroll of bad news.
Praise for Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch
”Galchen is an inventor and fabulist of the highest order: Her narratives are rigorous, antic creations that explore deceit, misinformation, identity, and the nature of knowledge. Her latest puzzle box of a novel is a surrealist horror story set in the 17th century . . . the story is winding and hallucinatory, full of poison, gossip, and astral musings.” —Vulture
”Galchen strikes the perfect balance between historical accuracy and modern humor to render Katharina vividly—a strong-willed, big-hearted healer and mother . . . It’s at once an illuminating account of history and a timely, provocative study of weaponized morality, group hysteria, and the villainization of powerful women.” —Buzzfeed
“Bewitching . . . Galchen is a sorcerer—a conjurer of the weird and wonderful. The tale has lessons for our own time about the power of fear and superstition to foment evil. But Galchen's playful, poetic sentences uplift and transport, like fairy tale magic.”
—Oprah Daily
”It is remarkable that Rivka Galchen’s Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch manages to pull off what, broadly speaking, is a witch story, one that is as serious as [The Crucible] and as playful as Updike’s [Witches of Eastwick] but does not fall prey to the pitfalls of either . . . a persuasive and very beautiful work of fiction. Or, it’s not strange at all, given how everything that Ms. Galchen has written to date has been singular.” —The Wall Street Journal
”Delightfully funny . . . Galchen has written another smart book that investigates the power of narrative, both good and bad, foregrounding a woman who’d only been a footnote to a famous man’s story, all while being funny and deceptively easy to read. It’s quite a magic trick.” —Los Angeles Times
”The comedy that runs through [Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch] is a magical brew of absurdity and brutality. Galchen has a Kafkaesque sense of the way the exercise of authority inflates egos and twists logic . . . There’s real sorcery here, but it arises only from the way Galchen fuses ancient and modern consciousness.”
—Ron Charles, The Washington Post
“Rivka Galchen’s smart, wry novel Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch is a thought-provoking take on the proverbial witch hunt . . . Punctuated with sparkling wit and irreverent humor, [the novel] taps into the depths of who we choose to fear and why.” —TIME
”Darkly funny . . . It’s this dry humour that makes the novel sparkle. . . Galchen’s evocation of Katharina is so vivid, and has such verve, that she transcends her figure, and becomes a character.” —Financial Times
”It’s that perfect combination of snark and the promise of magic . . . [Galchen's] writing always has teeth—this novel, culled from real-life historical documents but blessed with Galchen’s invention and insight, does not disappoint.” —Lit Hub
”Galchen's novel is exuberant—funny and urgent and full of a singular energy. Though based on a true story, it beautifully demonstrates Galchen's limber imagination and ability to find narrative harmony in the chaos of our world.”
—Refinery29, “38 Books You'll Want to Read This Summer”
”I want to bottle up the hilarious and infuriating energy of Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch and offer it to the creators of the paltry, meager little things that pass for novels these days: This is how you do it! . . . Not only does Galchen create in Katharina one of the wryest and funniest voices I’ve heard in a long time, she also manages to write a brilliant treatise on the inflation of a small lie into a huge one, and the merry-go-round of accusations that have plagued women since Eve (allegedly) took a bite out of that apple.” —The Millions, “Most Anticipated Books of 2021”
”Imagine a story set in 1620 that speaks directly to your own scalded, twenty-first century heart. By Rivka Galchen's magic, Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch instantly became one of my favorite books. I need no witchcraft to predict it will astonish, beguile, and transform you, too.” —Karen Russell, author of The Antidote
”Galchen’s latest book, which is by turns witty, sly, moving, and sharp, is a marvel to behold . . . There is so much in this novel to consider—the degree to which we make monsters of one another, the way that old age can make of femininity an apparently terrifying, otherworldly thing—but it is also, at every step along the way, an entirely delicious book. Dazzling in its humor, intelligence, and the richness of its created world.” —Kirkus
”In this compelling look at women’s rights and the invented crime of witchcraft, the surprise is that the perseverance of the accused shifts the focus from victimhood to basic mortality and the challenge of dealing with death and illness before a coherent understanding of disease existed. Highly recommended.” —Library Journal
”Though the story unfolds in seventeenth-century Germany, Galchen gives Kath and the rest of her characters modern speech habits in a way that retains authenticity and makes for compulsively readable prose . . . Enchanted creatures and enticing oddities populate the book’s pages . . . The highly satisfying result is part portrait of an eccentric woman, part social drama, and part nuanced recasting of historical misogynies.” —Booklist
“Vibrant [and] provocative . . . Like Maggie O’Farrell's prize-winning novel Hamnet, Galchen’s story succeeds in infusing a work of historical fiction with a completely modern sensibility, all without sacrificing any of the story's fidelity to its source material . . . There's nothing diabolical about it, but Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch is a consistently entertaining novel that casts its own memorable spell.”
—Shelf Awareness
“Galchen’s work—journalistic or creative—shows an ambidextrous ease with both scientific and literary knowledge . . . perhaps it is from the cross-fading of these categories of knowledge that her surreal, precise fiction derives its power . . . [F]unny, sad, and suffused with the weird, incandescent logic of a story-within-a-story distorted through a fever dream… [A] beautiful, slippery book that gives much. . . As soon as I finished, I wanted to read it all over again.”
—Women's Review of Books
”On every page of this brilliant, transporting novel are sentences of surreal poetry, of profound insight and enchanting observation, of Monty Python-like sublime nonsense and delightful fragments of fairy tale and lore. Tragic Katharina Kepler, so eccentric and misunderstood, so honest, loyal, brave, and funny, is surely one of literature’s great mothers. This is a novel to keep alongside your favorite Calvino or Ishiguro, though its special genius is pure Rivka Galchen.”
—Francisco Goldman, author of Monkey Boy
”Captivating . . . . Mesmerizing details abound . . . Galchen portrays her characters as complicated and full of wit . . . This is a resounding delight.”
—Publishers Weekly
”I cannot think of a more singular writer than Rivka Galchen. Here, she brings her forensic intelligence and wit to a historical novel that sheds bright light on our present. Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch is fiercely original, a mordant and ultimately devastating portrait of loss and terror from one of the most brilliant writers at work today.” —Katie Kitamura, author of Audition
”I love Rivka and everything she writes.” —César Aira, author of Ghosts
”This jewel of a novel is as perturbing as it is hilarious. It's also a fundamental piece of history—particularly relevant for these times—written with Rivka’s unusual intelligence and her sharp eye for detail.” —Alejandro Zambra, author of Ways of Going Home
”Galchen's take is drawn from raw historical documents but infused with humor to draw the surreal world of a gossipy, poisonous community.”
—Nylon, “10 June Book Releases to Add to Your Summer Reading List”
”The accusation of witchcraft is a mode of analysis, the name for a pattern that makes sense of social and personal grievances. As a parable, Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch communicates this phenomenon well...” —The Baffler
”When it comes to a sense of the weird, Galchen stands alone among the big name, youngish American Jewish novelists...” —Jewish Exponent
About the Author
Rivka Galchen’s 2008 first novel, Atmospheric Disturbances, and her 2014 story collection, American Innovations, were both New York Times Best Books of the Year. In 2019, Galchen published Rat Rule 79, her first book for young readers. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rona Jaffe Fellowship, and was named to The New Yorker’s list of 20 Writers Under 40.
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