Synopses & Reviews
"Sometimes you do not truly observe something until you study it in reverse," writes Karim Issar upon arrival to New York City from Qatar in 1999. Fluent in numbers, logic, and business jargon yet often baffled by human connection, the young financial wizard soon creates a computer program named Kapitoil that predicts oil futures and reaps record profits for his company.
At first an introspective loner adrift in New York's social scenes, he anchors himself to his legendary boss Derek Schrub and Rebecca, a sensitive, disillusioned colleague who may understand him better than he does himself. Her influence, and his father's disapproval of Karim's Americanization, cause him to question the moral implications of Kapitoil, moving him toward a decision that will determine his future, his firm's, and to whom — and where — his loyalties lie.
Review
"An innovative and incisive meditation on the wages of corporate greed, the fundamental darkness of its vision lit by the author's great comic intelligence and wit." Kathryn Davis, author of The Thin Place, Hell: A Novel, and Versailles
Review
"Teddy Wayne has written a brilliant book. Karim Issar is one of the freshest, funniest heroes I've come across in a long time." Ben Fountain, bestselling author of Brief Encounters with Che Guevara
Review
"Kapitoil is one of those uncommon novels that really is novel. Though the storytelling is conventional, it is satisfyingly so, and the book's estimable young narrator is a human type whom nobody until Wayne was ever inspired to write about." Jonathan Franzen, bestselling author of The Corrections
Review
"Flat out top-notch. Kapitoil makes you see America and the English language more clearly than ever before, and Karim Issar, the book's protagonist, is one of the most interesting characters we've had a chance to spend time with." McSweeneys.net
Review
"[A] funny and incisive novel of one young man's heady introduction to American culture." Booklist
Synopsis
Story of a young mathematician from Qatar who goes to New York and creates a computer program that predicts oil futures and reaps record profits for his company.
About the Author
Teddy Wayne is a graduate of Harvard and the Writing Program at Washington University in St. Louis, where he also taught fiction and creative nonfiction writing. The recipient of a 2010 NEA Creative Writing Fellowship, his fiction, satire, and nonfiction have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Time, Vanity Fair, Esquire, McSweeney's, the Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere. He lives in New York.