We’re delighted to report that Benjamín Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World (trans. Adrian Nathan West) is on The New York Times Book Review’s list of “The 10 Best Books of 2021.” The NYT said about the novel:
Labatut expertly stitches together the stories of the 20th century’s greatest thinkers to explore both the ecstasy and agony of scientific breakthroughs: their immense gains for society as well as their steep human costs. His journey to the outermost edges of knowledge — guided by the mathematician Alexander Grothendieck, the physicist Werner Heisenberg and the chemist Fritz Haber, among others — offers glimpses of a universe with limitless potential underlying the observable world, a “dark nucleus at the heart of things” that some of its witnesses decide is better left alone. This extraordinary hybrid of fiction and nonfiction also provokes the frisson of an extended true-or-false test: The further we read, the blurrier the line gets between fact and fabulism.
Read about the other nine books on the list here.
And that’s not all: Joshua Cohen’s The Netanyahus was selected as one of “The 10 Best Books of 2021" by The Wall Street Journal. You can check out the WSJ’s write-up and see the other books on the list by clicking here.