On the Nature of Human Romantic Interaction » (Reprint)

With a collection of short stories that explores the very un-scientific idea of love with a scientist's exacting eye, Karl Iagnemma's debut was an experiment that has succeeded, according to critics and fans. As The Los Angeles Times puts it, "Iagnemma's fiction can make even the most ardent math-hater appreciate the parabolic nature of life's ups and downs."

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.

Gail Caldwell

Faith, to the scientist, is a necessary evil. He or she must believe in the possibility of hope - in the provable hypothesis, the laboratory experiment, the research path toward enlightenment - and yet believe, more fully, in the supremacy of empirical data...

Karl Iagnemma, who works as a research scientist in robotics at MIT, has a striking grasp of this paradox, and his perspicacity infuses the stories in his debut collection.—The Boston Globe