Aloys

Professor Aloys Foulcault-Oeg is an obscure scholar with a revolutionary theory and no audience, until suddenly he has everyone. One moment he's deliverin\g a spectacular address to the elite; the next he's fleeing into the night with a troupe of con artists in a place called Wreckville. R.A. Lafferty's debut novel is a strange, bitter fairy tale about what happens when unrecognized genius collides with recognition itself. Aloys has spent his life invisible, and when the world finally sees him, he discovers that being known is its own kind of prison. The prose crackles with Lafferty's idiosyncratic wit, part picarescal adventure and part existential meditation on fame, identity, and the long walk into darkness after the applause stops. It's a book about the terror of getting everything you thought you wanted.