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Reviews

Praise for The Fact Checker: ""The Fact Checker is a workplace comedy, a trivia-rich love letter to New York, and, to top it all off, nicely written, which is more of a rare treat these days than it should be. I tore through its lean, witty, plot-heavy pages in just a few hours... The fact-checker himself...is less the subject of the story than its tour guide, and what he's showing us isn't really The New Yorker or even fact-checking, but New York City before the smartphone. Kelley's decision to set The Fact Checker in 2004 is his single most impactful novelistic decision.... Perhaps what I most ached for while reading Kelley's book wasn't a simpler world than the one we live in now but a simpler feeling, which Kelley captures exactly: the simple feeling of liking to learn new things, and liking to meet new people who might teach you new things. The simple feeling that ""known unknowns"" are the right place to start but far from the end of the story.""--Susan Choi, The Yale Review ""[The Fact Checker] is a sprightly hyperlocal caper that is also, intentionally or not, a Notes and Comment on the fragile state of urban intellectual masculinity."" --Alexandra Jacobs, New York Times ""[The Fact Checker] raise[s] some of the most relevant questions du jour: What is a fact? What is truth? And who gets to decide?"" --Ilana Masad, Los Angeles Times ""One thing is for sure: Kelley's comedic hero is a chronic, self-sabotaging overthinker and, less amusingly, an overdrinker. ""The Fact Checker"" lands as a clever caper not just about sometimes elusive truths, but also about ""the paralysis of encyclopedic doubt."" . . . By engaging with what the author calls ""thickets of untruth,"" this book could not be more timely."" --Heller McAlpin, Christian Science Monitor ""Kelley's novel is less in the lineage of McInerney and more in the tradition of another facts-obsessed writer from New York: Thomas Pynchon. . . Like Kelley's novel, Pynchon's book arrived during a tumultuous time in America, one where intense polarization had damaged the nation's fundamental sense of the truth. . . . The Fact Checker [is] a book that is intensely aware of its time. Perhaps we need more subtle comedies like this to help us comprehend what has happened to the truth."" --Nick Ripatrazone, The Bulwark ""Wonderful . . . a romp . . . this is a novel with both soul and humor, and it will never make you yearn to be a fact-checker. Unless you want your heart broken.""--Jim Kelly, Air Mail Editor's Picks ""In his sort-of-mystery debut, with understated humor and zippy prose, former New Yorker fact-checker Kelley is a fluid and funny writer, divertingly digressing on the nature of fact-checking and filling out a backstory for the narrating fact-checker, who, both well-informed and hilariously unaware, is as charmingly pedantic as a character could be.""--Annie Bostrom, Booklist ""Kelley's debut is poignant, funny, and full of the quirky characters that make life interesting.""--Joanna M. Burkhardt, Library Journal ""A bravura debut.""--Kirkus Reviews ""Kelley's droll and pithy narration propels the story, as does the impressive plotting.... Readers will be swept up.""--Publishers Weekly ""Austin Kelly has written a quirky, funny, smart novel about one of the weirder publishing jobs in New York. His protagonist seems to be a much better fact checker than I ever was, dogged and meticulous, though that doesn't ultimately save him from his own human impulses."" --Jay McInerney, author of Bright Lights, Big City ""What a joy it is to follow the Fact Checker on his journey to learn the truth (in the era that launched truthiness) about suspicious activity at an organic farmer's market. Really, he's looking for a girl, and what he finds is so much more and less and deliciously other than expected. ""You never know, when you are picking and poking, what will ooze and leave a stain,"" the Fact Checker tells us. It's one reliable truth in this darkly funny urban epic that serves up earnest innocence and clear-eyed cynicism in equal measure, and captivates to the very end."" --Laura Sims, author of Looker and How Can I Help You ""In an age of disinformation and deepfakes, here comes a slyly unassuming novel about the nature of truth and what really matters. The Fact Checker is a propulsive mystery about heirloom tomatoes, a missing woman, or slipshod journalism: take your pick. It's also a moving portrait of what it's like to be young and in love with the city, and the obsessions--and doubt--it can inspire."" --Ben McGrath, author of Riverman: An American Odyssey ""The Fact Checker begins like it's going to be a conventional mystery story before turning into something much wilder and more original that questions the nature of how we really know what's true and what isn't. It's as if Martin Scorsese's film Afterhours ran into Adaptation at a bar and convinced it to go for an adventure. I read The Fact Checker in a flash, enjoyed the hell out of it, and woke up still thinking about it the next day."" --Peter Blauner, New York Times bestselling author of The Intruder and Picture in the Sand

Author Information

Austin Kelley is a former New Yorker fact checker. As a journalist he has written for The New York Times, The Nation, Slate, The Wall Street Journal, and The New Yorker. He has a Ph.D. from Duke University, and now teaches writing at NYU. The Fact Checker is his first novel.

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